


Flawed Crystals

by A_Friendly_Irin, Farla



Series: Flawed Crystals [2]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: All Comments Welcome, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Canon Divergence - A Single Pale Rose, Claustrophobia, Cooked Dove: Meant to be Eaten, Corrupted Gems, Countertextual Readings, Forgiveness, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Mental Illness, Minor Ronaldo Fryman, POV Second Person, Rose Quartz is Rose Quartz, Self-Harm, Shattering - Freeform, Therapy, Twine Fic, btp, fangame, rbtp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-01-15 18:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 27
Words: 32,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21257453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Friendly_Irin/pseuds/A_Friendly_Irin, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farla/pseuds/Farla
Summary: The gems leave Steven for one final mission. They come back corrupted. To save them, Steven will have to face uncomfortable truths about his friends, his family, and himself.(Rose Quartz is Rose Quartz AU, canon divergent from A Single Pale Rose)Game link.





	1. Info

This is a fangame made in Twine. It uses [Another RPG Engine](https://anotherrpgenthusiast.itch.io/another-rpg-engine), by AnotherRPGEnthusiast.

The story takes place in a Rose Quartz is Rose Quartz AU. Rose Quartz and Pink Diamond are separate people. The events of A Single Pale Rose happened similarly, but what Steven saw in Pearl's memories was that Rose Quartz really did shatter Pink Diamond. The story begins several months after this point.

This is my first game, so please tell me if I made any goofs or if anything isn't working for you! Share any cool strategies you thought were really fun, too, I love it when people experiment in ways the developers didn't intend.

The game features music by Kasey Ozymy from the _Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass_ OST. You can listen to more of his work on [Bandcamp](https://kaseyozymy.bandcamp.com/).

** [You can play the game on itch.io by clicking this link!](https://a-friendly-irin.itch.io/flawed-crystals) **

### Trivia

  * The "Mobile Stone" item is a reference to _Rusty Quill Gaming_, and a pun on "mobile phone", the British term for a cellphone.
  * The "Empty Bottle" item contains an oblique reference to the _The Legend of Zelda_ series, where some titles feature empty bottles as highly sought-after items.
  * The "Optimist Badge" and "Pessimist Badge" items are references to _I Miss the Sunrise_.
  * The "Hot Spurs" item is a reference to one of Rikku's Mix abilities in _Final Fantasy X_.
  * The "Watcher's Crown" item is a reference to _The Magnus Archives_, and to my username, "Irin", which means "Watcher".
  * The "Dragon's Quill" item is a reference to our blog, [Dragon Quill](http://www.dragon-quill.net/).
  * The "Ribbon Badge" item is a reference to the _Final Fantasy_ series, where ribbons are a recurring piece of status protection equipment.
  * The "Song of Healing" ability is a reference to _The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask_.
  * The "Harmony of Dissonance" ability is named after _Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance_.
  * The "Crushing Despair" ability is named after a spell in _Dungeons & Dragons_.
  * The "Doomed Aspirations" ability is named after an attack in _Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions_.
  * The Perfect Crystal's "cut" attacks are named after real gem-cutting styles.
  * The Perfect Crystal's use of mathematical functions as attacks was inspired by the Secretary enemies in _OFF_, with "Oblique Asymptote" being a direct reference.

### Known Issues

  * The game will not work in Internet Explorer due to JavaScript compatibility issues.
  * Don't refresh the page if you can help it. The JavaScript doesn't always refresh correctly, and this can cause numerous errors.
  * The settings don't always "stick" between refreshes. Toggle them on and off again if you experience issues.


	2. Lapis Lazuli

### Version 0.50

Initial release. Following the return of the gems, Steven, alone, must reclaim his house from a corrupted Lapis Lazuli. To do so, he'll need to make an unlikely ally.

This is the tutorial segment. Please try to break things to catch bugs for me to fix! I actually made several special defeat handlers for failing the tutorial fights, if you want to go hunting for Easter eggs. For the most part, the game is very forgiving about defeat, but there is one way to get a true game over. Can you find it?


	3. The Derelict

### Version 0.60

**The next area is live!** The fields around the barn have grown into a strange, chaotic jungle that threatens to swallow Beach City. Peridot is somewhere inside, but getting her to hold still might be easier said than done.

An additional change that comes with this version is that **HP upgrades now give +5, up from +3**. I hope this will lead to a better balance between Defense and HP. (Keep in mind that unlike _Attack the Light_, this game uses a lumped weighting formula, so Defense is more valuable against strong attacks; but on the flipside, there will be defense-piercing attacks in later sections, so beware of putting all your points into Defense.) Characters in existing saves should have their HP values automatically corrected; please tell me if you experience any problems.


	4. Peridot

Salvage the derelict.

### Version 0.65

  * Corrupted Peridot now has 6 DEF (down from 8) and 160 HP (up from 150).
  * Slightly changed the way the navigation arrows work. There shouldn't be any problems, but tell me if you encounter any.
  * Jasper now has a natural tolerance of 1 vs. DEF Down.
  * If you used any bottles of Rose's tears, they should now refresh correctly upon returning to home.


	5. Stage 3 Poll

Please vote in the comments on which gem you want to see next: Pearl, Garnet, or Amethyst!


	6. Stage 3 Prerelease

**The Strawberry Battlefield has entered beta testing.** DM me if you wish to be a beta tester.

### Version 0.69

Additional changes in this update:

  * Lasting damage (such as from the apple orchard) should no longer persist if you are defeated in battle or use the Mobile Stone to return to home.
  * The unavailable options at the warp pad are now colored gray, as intended.
  * Fixed an error with respawn failing to correctly reset. Respawners should no longer respawn immediately.
  * The message for bubble popping now uses the correct pronouns for the target.
  * Stevonnie's personality cooldowns should now decrement correclty.
  * Rising Tides no longer produces an error message in its preview.
  * Lick and Rose's Tears now revive to 50% HP; bottles of Rose's tears now revive to 100% HP.
  * The Insight Badge should no longer make it possible to gain floating-point XP values. Characters who currently have floating-point XP should have their values rounded in this update.
  * The level up screen will now show your base HP, not including any modifiers from e.g. the Confidence Badge.
  * Empty Bottles should now charge you the correct amount of scrap.
  * Fixed an error with enemy levels sometimes being counted twice.


	7. Hotfix

### Version 0.69.1

Why did no one tell me I broke enemy encounters in the last update?!? Well, it's fixed now, at any rate.

  * Enemy encounters should work again.
  * Jumper spiders' finisher should be slightly less devastating.
  * The end of the Strawberry Battlefield will now unlock as a warp destination when you reach it.


	8. The Bound

The Strawberry Battlefield has been overrun by giant insects and other pests. Their infighting is destroying the peaceful vista, leaving stalks trampled and strawberries smashed open to rot. You suspect Garnet is somewhere within, but you'll have to fight your way to her.

### Version 0.70

Another feature released this update: By very popular demand, **character indices will now be shown on the battle map to assist with hotkey targeting**. Tell me if you experience any issues with these or wish for their appearance to be changed.


	9. Stage 4 Poll

<s>Vote on who you want to see for Stage 4: Amethyst or Pearl?</s>

**It's going to be Amethyst, sorry. I already started working on her and with Steven Universe Future rapidly approaching its conclusion, I can't afford any more delays.**


	10. Garnet

Free the bound.

### Version 0.75

  * The screen should no longer "flicker" when ending a dark-styled battle. (However, to accomplish this I had to potentially allow for the possibility of the dark styling "sticking" on all passages after battle. Please tell me if you encounter any weirdness.)
  * Adjusted the experience curve for higher levels; if you've done level grinding, you might experience a little weirdness in your first battle, but things should get back on track after that.


	11. Stage 4 beta

The Alpha Kindergarten is now open for beta testing. In particular, I would like to know if you're finding Garnet and/or the mole enemies too overpowered.

### Version 0.79

  * Nerfed stat mod effects because they were way too powerful. Standard buffs and debuffs will now change the stat by only 3, rather than 5. (The Beefy Sweatband and Bicycle Helmet still have an effect of 5, to increase their value relative to abilities.)
  * Metallic Shield will now persist between poofing and revival.
  * The preview calculation for area-of-effect abilities should no longer throw an error.
  * Infectious Enthusiasm will now say Peridot flashes a thumbs-up at "herself" if she targets herself.
  * Optimism should no longer display an undefined text error.


	12. The Wretched

The Alpha Kindergarten has been dead for millennia, but now it churns with activity once more. Amethyst lairs somewhere deep below. You will have to brave the darkness, and the things within it, to reach her.

Supernova proved extremely broken in testing. I have nerfed it significantly; please tell me your experience.

### Version 0.80

  * Supernova cost increased to 10 (from 9).
  * Supernova can now only be used when Stevonnie is undamaged.
  * Training Modules now have a description and work correctly.
  * Crystallized gems can no longer be moved, to prevent the exploit of moving them to the leader spot and nullifying all the hits.
  * Increased the power of all of the bad ending boss' attacks, and increased their HP.
  * It is now actually possible to defeat the bad ending boss; previously, I messed up the if statement that was supposed to take you to a special scene when their HP reached 0.


	13. Amethyst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for self-harm and body dysphoria in this section.

Love the wretched.

### Version 0.85

  * The "..." link to continue scenes is now more visible, and the continue buttons in flashback scenes now look different (and, hopefully, nicer).


	14. Stage 5 beta

The Great Desert is now available for beta testing.

Additionally:

  * The Foresight Badge now grants tolerance against Grappled as well as Stunned. (If you already have it equipped, you will need to re-equip it to take effect.)
  * The early fights against Peridot now require you to reduce her HP to a lower threshold at stages 4 and above.
  * Enemy boxes will now display a message if they are grappled.
  * XP curve redone for hopefully the last time; the curve now goes all the way up to level 30. Enemy XP growth has been tweaked to double the bonus from levels at stages 5+ and the curve has been adjusted accordingly, making it exceptionally difficult for you to level grind beyond 18 until you enter stage 5.
  * Runner birds now have an additional attack that inflicts ATK and DEF Down.
  * Fixed the blank spaces that could occur in column attacks.
  * Slam Dunk now has an attack power of 50%, as originally intended.
  * I've brought in the Alert status from the default engine; stunned enemies cannot be stunned again on the next turn. This is to prevent stunlocking with Amethyst's Suplex.
  * Bosses now have 1 less tolerance against Grappled to make Suplex II and Grappling Hooks more valuable.
  * You can now buy Toy Cars at the start of the game, instead of waiting until stage 3.
  * Jumper enemies and corrupted Garnet now gain No Mercy at stage 3 rather than stage 6 and stage 4, respectively.
  * Cracked status should now persist after poofing.
  * The "Cracked" message will now be displayed with the correct font and size.
  * Swapped the functionalities of Supernova and Crashing Skies. Supernova power reduced to 100% (from 150%), cost reduced to 6 (from 10), and full-HP requirement removed; Crashing Skies power increased to 150% (from 100%), cost increased to 7 (from 4). Because Crashing Skies can't be paired with Focus, this should hopefully be less game-breaking.
  * Amethyst's Slam Dunk now works differently against the bad ending boss; it will still do no damage, but will inflict ATK Down.
  * Removed the bad ending boss' tolerances to ATK and DEF Down, mainly to make Amethyst a little more useful.
  * Crescendo II should now incorporate the chain into its power like Crescendo I.
  * Crashing Skies now forwards straight to the confirm phase.
  * Singularity cost up to 6 (from 5) and power down to 400% (from 500%). Tell me if it's still overpowered.
  * Amethyst, Peridot, Jasper, and Greg now have the more visible "return home" button in their chats.


	15. Version 0.89.3

So I know it's really weird to be introducing a new mechanic this late in the game, but **Lick now has limited uses.** These uses are carried across battles but are restored when returning home (or when resting in the prologue -- see, I finally made that mechanically useful!). You begin the game with 2 and gain 1 more at the completion of each stage. This is to introduce some aspect of resource management into the game, because I was finding battles were much too easy when healing was limitless. Please tell me what you think, and if you encounter any issues with this. (Thanks to Farla for coming up with this idea.)

Additionally, all enemies in the Desert now have 1 more point of Attack. I may spread this change to other enemies as well.


	16. Difficulty Upgrade

**Standard enemy attacks have been redone to give a smoother difficulty curve and be generally stronger.** They now gain +15% power every stage after 2, and special abilities (such as the tomato cannon's charged attack and the bat's Shooting Star) now have their power tied to this curve. (Generally, armor-piercing attacks have half power, ranged attacks have 10% less power, and strong attacks have a flat addition to whatever the normal power would be.) I hope this makes the game more challenging! Please tell me what you think.

  * All Barn enemies now have 1 more point of Attack.
  * All enemies except Battlefield enemies now gain 1 additional point of Attack every stage.
  * Monsters and bats now have their counters tied to the new attack power curve as well. (Crawlers' remain fixed because it is an area attack.) The numbers have been tweaked to make their counters a bit less powerful, by about 10%.
  * Caterpillars and butterflies have their basic attack power reduced by 10%.
  * Jumper spiders now have their Pummelling Strike power increased to 80% at stage 2, to put them on par with Garnet's power.
  * Enemies should now be affected by Grappled.
  * Corrupted Pearl now has a reduced chance of using Quick Strike twice if she has other attacks available.
  * Buff items should now work correctly.
  * Serpents' "Collision" attack should now work correctly.
  * Barn enemies now have more HP.
  * Pearl and The Sun now have slightly higher Attack.


	17. The Lost

The Great Desert is a place of many secrets, where forgotten remnants of the gem war litter the sands. Pearl has chosen this place as her domain, willing to fly its whole length over and over but never beyond. Can you find her in this vast and forbidding expanse?

### Version 0.90

  * The bad ending boss is no longer completely immune to Stunned and Grappled, though they still have a very high tolerance.
  * You can no longer open the menu during home chats.
  * If you tell Jasper she is corrupted in the tutorial, she will now remember the same as if you had told her at home.
  * Suplex will now use the "failure" text when used on an Alert enemy.
  * Suplex II will now correctly base failure vs. success text on Grappled tolerance rather than Stunned tolerance.
  * If one of the doors in the Kindergarten ate your keystones, they should be returned to your inventory.
  * If your game somehow got stuck on the "dark" styling, that should now be fixed when you load your save.
  * Large enemies no longer display the "Grappled!" message in their character boxes when grappled.

Trying something a bit different this update: Since previous healing sequences had a surprising number of bugs, beta testers get early access to the healing sequence with this update.


	18. Pearl

Find the lost.

### Version 0.91

  * The desert should now be accessible in the treasure finder.
  * Pearl's Quick Strike will no longer interfere with Stevonnie's Focus.
  * Son of the Son can now revive enemies in the corrupted Pearl battle.
  * Son of the Son's revival ability now does not revive to full HP until stage 4.
  * Pumpkin enemies' attack power increased by 10%.
  * Enemies should now only counterattack once per round, with the exception of corrupted Amethyst. (Moles will still counter every attack since their counter operates differently.) To balance for this change, all Kindergarten enemies except moles have gained 1 more point of Attack, and counters have been strengthened to about the power of a normal attack.
  * Serpents should no longer produce an error when attempting to use Collision on a poofed gem.
  * Corrupted Garnet now has more HP at all stages.
  * Corrupted Garnet now changes form every 3 turns (down from 4).
  * You can no longer warp directly to the end of the Strawberry Battlefield until you have beaten the boss. This means you will have to go through the whole gauntlet again if you fail!
  * Eclipse power down to 125% (from 150%).
  * Fixed an error that could cause Future Vision and Tremorsense counters to prevent after-action effects from occurring.


	19. Rebalancing and stage 6 beta

A lot of changes this update! In addition to releasing stage 6 to beta testers, I rebalanced enemies to hopefully provide a smoother difficulty curve.

### Version 0.94

  * Enemy stat growth has been redone. It turns out I made enemies waaay too strong in an attempt to counterbalance how plentiful healing became in the late game, and I am now attempting to mitigate that. Tell me if this works:
    * Enemies no longer gain an extra level's worth of Attack and HP with every stage, but they do gain slightly more HP per level.
    * Offense-focused enemies now cap out at 3 points of Attack per stage instead of 4.
    * Several bosses have also had their Attack stats decreased.
    * Enemy attack power now gains a smaller increment per stage.
    * With the exception of Beach and Kindergarten enemies, non-boss enemies have gained +1 Defense across the board.
    * All bosses have had their HP curves adjusted; they now gain much more HP at later stages. Hopefully this will counterbalance a blitzing strategy without making the battles drag.
    * Initial Lick uses increased to 4 (from 2), but you will no longer gain an additional use of Lick every time you clear a stage. (You may observe some weirdness if your save is in the middle of a dungeon, but the uses should correctly reset when you return home.
    * Bottles of Rose's Tears now cap out at 3 (down from 4), and the cost of each bottle has increased by 100 scrap. (If you already have 4, though, you get to keep your extra. I'm nice.)
  * Save files look different! They now display your current area and the number of gems you've healed instead of an excerpt of the current passage. Old saves will still have the regular formatting; you'll need to update or overwrite them for the new display to take effect. This feature is a little wonky, so tell me of any problems you encounter.
  * Meteor I power down to 125% (from 150%) and Meteor II power down to 150% (from 200%).
  * Increased the bad ending boss' HP.
  * Crawlers and caterpillars now require a longer warm-up before they can use their cracking abilities.
  * Pearl's talk to Amethyst now raises her Attack and Defense instead of lowering Amethyst's Attack.
  * Lick should now actually be unusuable when you run out of uses.
  * The activation text for Thorns has been rewritten to stay on one line.
  * Minibosses now give a little more XP.
  * Fixed an error in the preview of Rising Tides II.
  * Fixed an error in the preview for column strike attacks.
  * Abilities that draw additional Aggression now state this in their descriptions.
  * Large enemies can now display their health bars.


	20. The Shattered

Bismuth's forge has been fired up again. What horrors might she create in her corrupted state?

### Version 0.95

  * It should no longer be possible to skip Amethyst's post-healing scenes.
  * Rebalanced enemies again. They should now deal significantly less damage, especially in the early stages, but some can now take an extra hit or two.
  * The area select screen now has a fancy new interface.


	21. Bismuth

Heal the shattered.

### Version 0.96

  * **NEW FEATURE:** You can now space out enemy attacks! When the "advance turn" button is pressed, **only the number of enemies equal to the actions you have taken that turn** will act. The full round only ends when everyone has acted. This should help you avoid the endgame issue of a swarm of monsters all attacking the same person and poofing them in a single round! (The source code has been updated if you would like to see how this was done.)
  * Because it now matters, bosses now always act last in priority order (except corrupted Amethyst). (This does not apply to minibosses.)
  * Bubbles and Thorns now protect against status effects.
  * The START button should now be vertically centered in all browsers.
  * Bismuth's "Perfection" ability should no longer crash the game if used on herself.


	22. Endgame beta

The first part of the endgame is now available to beta testers. Enter the password on the prompt that appears at the home base.

**Your input is highly appreciated for this section. I don't just want bug reports, I want your thoughts on the story and your experience. This section is highly variable depending on your choices throughout the game, and I want to ensure it works for all players.**

### Version 0.97

  * Fixed a glitch that occurred when entering the temple for the first time.
  * Bismuth's Rallying Cry now functions correctly, and displays the correct healing value in the preview.


	23. The Forgotten

Remember.

### Version 0.98

  * A certain boss now has more accurate tolerance values.
  * The content boundary now explicitly informs the player they are entering a point of no return.


	24. Final stage beta

The final stage has been released for beta testing. **I am _very_ interested to hear your thoughts on it. Please tell me your experience and how you felt.**

### Version 0.99

  * Fixed a text glitch in the preview of Rising Tides II.
  * Battles with special backgrounds should no longer encounter display errors during in-battle scenes.
  * The bad end boss' Attack has been reduced to 35 (from 40).


	25. The Center of the Universe

_I need you to respect me, I don't respect me_

_I need you to love me, I don't love me_

_But I want you to know you don't know me_

_Can you change my mi-i-i-i-ind_

_Can you change my mi-i-i-i-ind_

_Can you change my mi-i-i-i-ind_

_Change my mind_

### Version 1.0

  * The Wretched's tails now have a respawn time of 4 (same as fighting Amethyst at stage 6), up from 3.
  * The Flawed Crystal should now persist across save files. You can get more if you beat the Perfect Crystal again on your next run.
  * Corrupted Bismuth now has more HP at every stage (roughly one additional round's worth of attacks).
  * Corrupted Bismuth should once again be resistant to stun effects.

It's done. Thank you to everyone who followed me throughout development, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I plan to write a postmortem and artist's statement in the coming weeks, so watch this space.


	26. Developer Commentary

I thought it would be worthwhile to do a reflection on this game; what worked and what didn't, how the final product changed from my initial design, and other difficulties I encountered. For today, I'll just be focusing on the game design; I plan to make a separate artist's statement on the development of the story.

## Inspiration

I actually had the idea for this game for quite some time; possibly even before "A Single Pale Rose", though I can't remember for certain. My main inspiration was _[Czarina Must Die!](https://rpgmaker.net/games/5904/)_, a little RPG Maker game I played back when it first came out in 2014. If you watched the credits the whole way through, you may recognize the developer's name: "Craze" on RMN is, unquestionably, my biggest inspiration and idol in game design. Everything he makes completely blows apart the concept of a jRPG and makes me question the most fundamental elements of the genre. Even when he makes mistakes, they are _fascinating_ mistakes that teach me just as much as his successes. His games are always a delight.

The thing that fascinated me about _Czarina Must Die!_ was the party mechanic. In most RPGs, you have [an arbitrary limit on how many characters you can take into battle](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArbitraryHeadCountLimit). This is for game balance purposes, of course; you want a complex story that features a lot of characters, but still want to limit your game's tactical complexity to a manageable level. A lot of people make fun of this, but it's really quite reasonable.

But _Czarina Must Die!_ says, no. We're not going to do that. We're gonna do something buck-wild: You get to use every single character at once, all _six_. That's a huge party size for a jRPG; even _Final Fantasy IV_ capped out at five. But it doesn't dump them all on you at once: you start with two, and get one new character in every floor of the dungeon. In this way, the game gradually ramps up in tactical complexity at an even pace throughout its entire span, but so subtly you hardly even notice. Every floor gives you a new character to play with (and an additional point in the action economy) and gives you time to learn how to use them before introducing you to the next. Even with how compressed and fast-paced the game is overall, it has an incredibly natural learning curve.

As soon as I played _Czarina Must Die!_, I knew I wanted to make a game with a similar structure. Because oh, the storytelling possibilities! So many jRPGs love to trumpet about the power of friendship, but this is the only time I've actually _felt_ it. Every character definitively adds to the team and everyone is valued; no one gets outgrown or left behind. What if a dramatic mid-game event makes you lose them all again and you regain them in a different order, how would that force you to see the character dynamics, both narrative and mechanical, in a different light? What if you could choose what order you got them in, what would that say about your priorities, what if the characters reacted to that?

It's that last idea that I used for this game. My inspiration there came from most of Craze's other works, which are non-linear RPGs where you can tackle dungeons in nearly any order to gain equipment, skills, and sometimes even characters. They're basically Metroidvania in feel, which is another genre I love.

I also got the idea of a communal skill resource from his game _[Obelisk: Devilkiller](https://rpgmaker.net/games/3937/)_. In that game, every attack generated "Burst Points" that could be used by any character to execute powerful abilities -- sound familiar? There were many more compounding factors there, such as critical hits and elemental matchups awarding more points, and individual character resources in addition to Burst Points. I preferred to keep things simple and manageable in my game by only tying point generation to basic attacks, an idea I got from another developer's game, _[Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis](https://rpgmaker.net/games/272/)_.

Finally, I realized I would need a way to give the player some control over defense and enemy targeting, since completely random targeting is something I despise in RPGs, and it would have become a nightmarish crapshoot with seven characters. I went quick and dirty with this one; the only well-documented game I'd played with an aggro system was _Dragon Age_, so that's the one I copied. I tried to match the initial aggro from row placement to the initial-aggro-by-distance formula as best I could, and I believe I roughly matched the aggro decay per round rate to DA's threat decay per second rate assuming the traditional Dungeons & Dragons conceit of a round being six seconds. I didn't sweat the details, though.

Obviously, I also took a lot of inspiration from _Attack the Light_. (I've actually never played _Save the Light_ since I haven't kept up to date with my consoles and I didn't want to get spoiled for its mechanics, so I didn't use anything from it even though Connie and Peridot's fighting styles would have been relevant.) This is the one I diverged from the most, though, as I will explain.

## Initial Design

I started my design not with the individual characters, but the basic mechanics.

I came up with the idea of no headcount limit very early, but that led to some issues with the positioning. I very briefly considered having Lapis be a fighter, but quickly ditched the idea because I couldn't think of any fighting style that made sense for her. That left me with 7 characters, which is a prime number -- not great for battle maps. I considered having a 4-character front row with a 3-character back row, but I knew I wanted to have column-strike attacks and there was just no way to make those work with that setup. The solution came to me once I figured out the aggro system: it was totally reasonable to place the odd one out in a completely separate slot with its own rules, and that would in fact give the player greater control over the aggro system! I had already planned for Jasper to be the tank at this point, so that was perfect for her.

Then there was the question of action economy. I did actually consider _Attack the Light_'s free-action-with-automatic-action-points system, but that just got awkward with a variable party size -- would I increase the action points you got per round depending on party size? By how much? As I got to thinking about it, I ended up realizing I didn't actually like _Attack the Light_'s system in the first place. It was a cool idea, but horribly unbalanced in practice -- everyone just had Garnet attack all the time, only using the other gems in the rare instances where you needed them to do something Garnet couldn't do. I seriously watched a playthrough where the player didn't use Amethyst _at all_. And that's totally antithematic to _Steven Universe_! This show is supposed to be about working together and valuing everyone's contributions, not one person being the center of the universe and single-handedly solving every single problem with overpowered abilities!

_*looks directly into the camera*_

So, no... Let's scale that back a bit. We'll force players to value everyone by using a more traditional action economy where everyone can only act once per round. But I still like the communal resource aspect -- that's still in keeping with the themes of teamwork and everyone making different contributions. So we'll keep that, but have it interact more directly with the action economy by letting you turn actions into Star Points, just like in _Obelisk: Devilkiller_ and _Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis_. We have the best of both worlds: Special skills are communally sourced and require the characters to share and work together, but each individual character has the same intrinsic value and you need to use all of them to get the most out of the system. And as a bonus, that solves the problem of scale -- now, players gain more Star Points with more characters just as a natural outgrowth of the mechanics!

For the damage formula, I actually initially considered using a divisive formula, because I thought _Attack the Light_ used one and I had heard it was more intuitive on the player's side. I actually got pretty far in implementing this, including incorporating stat buffs and debuffs as proportional stages like in _Pokemon_, but it fell through when I realized I couldn't scale it. In a divisive system, individual stat points gain depreciating value over the course of the game as the proportion, not the absolute value, is what's important; to adequately balance this, you need to have a carefully-calibrated stat growth curve over the whole length of the game, and I had no idea how to do that. So, I kept it simple instead. Subtractive: 1 point of Attack equals 1 point of damage, easy to follow and easy to control for over a long period.

As for the formula itself... From what I could gather, _Attack the Light_'s formula is a specific-weighting system:

_ATK*W -- DEF = DMG_

I don't like this, because it devalues Defense compared to Attack. Defense is always only valued at 1 point of damage reduction, but 1 point of Attack can translate to much more given a high-weight attack. This is also really biased in favor of the player, because Garnet's attacks all have absolutely ridiculous weights that let her trivialize every single fight. (She can beat the final boss in like three hits, it's ridiculous.) I prefer systems where Defense is a valid specialization that actually matters, and to do that I need to place it on even footing with Attack. So, I changed the formula to a lumped weighting system:

_[ATK -- DEF]*W = DMG_

However, this now runs into the problem that the system breaks if Attack and Defense are equal, no matter the power of the attack. The solution would be to keep Attack and Defense on different scales (this is what _Attack the Light_ does), but a) that gives me hives and b) stat values are already so low that the margin is still too small. Even 1 point of difference in Defense or Attack produces a huge difference in results. The system is too inflexible; I don't have a lot of room to vary enemies.

So I added a base constant and boosted all Defense values by the same amount:

_[5 + ATK -- DEF]*W = DMG_

The constant is small enough that it shouldn't cause anything to get too wild, but it gives me more margin for adjusting Defense values; now the formula only breaks if Attack and Defense values differ by more than 5. And as a bonus, Attack and Defense can now be on the same scale as each other. Yay!

I also wanted to pin down status effects early on. I went with a very basic set: stat debuffs, stun, weak damage-over-time, and strong damage-over-time. _Attack the Light_ used the generic RPG standbys of poison and burning for its damage-over-time, but I found that uninspired, and choose to style it with aesthetics more appropriate to gems: light-based glitching and sound-based glitching. Mechanically, _Attack the Light_'s damage-over-time appeared to be completely fixed (3 damage for poison and 6 damage for burning), which is dumb, so I changed it. I used proportional damage-over-time because it was simplest, and made Disharmony indefinite to make it qualitatively distinct from Interference. The debuffs were trickier... I failed to find any documentation for how it worked in _Attack the Light_, but honestly it was probably something dumb like a proportional difference, which is unspeakably stupid in a subtractive defense system. I ended up going with a flat rate. Initially I changed stats by 5 points, but this proved much too extreme, so I dampened it to 3 points and saved 5-point effects for special items and abilities.

I also knew I wanted the Cracked status from very early on, because GRIMDARK.

I didn't come up with Grappled or Stuck until the areas where they appeared (which in Grappled's case was very early).

Healing mechanics were actually one of the last things I settled on. For a long time I pictured them as proportional, like healing skills in _Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass_; but when I wanted to make HP and Defense meaningfully distinct specializations, I knew I had to use fixed healing. With proportional healing, HP becomes extremely overvalued compared to Defense, even in a subtractive defense system; because even if you're taking more damage from your lower Defense, you're also getting more back per heal, so it all evens out. I toyed with the idea of Defense increasing your inbound healing, but that was complicated and might just shift the problem in the other direction.

_Attack the Light_ uses fixed healing, starting at 10 with several upgrades of +5 each you can unlock at various levels, so I decided to go with that. Since Steven is a main fighter with a normal level progression in this, I couldn't have him burn five levels just on healing upgrades, so I made the healing boost automatic, +1 every level. Due to the change to the Star Point system, healing is also more infrequent here instead of a basic action, so in initial playtesting I quickly realized I needed to improve the base healing rate. I doubled it to 20, which in retrospect may have been too much? It's basically a full heal now at any level unless you really pump HP, but the cost is prohibitive enough that maybe that's okay?

Balance is hard, guys.

## Character Design

I designed the characters while I was still designing the basic mechanics, so they went through a lot of iterations as I had to refine and discard various mechanics. While I would eventually settle on a fixed number of abilities for each character, initially I just wrote down every idea I had.

The idea of every character having a basic attack that each had a slightly different gimmick was one I settled on very quickly.

An important feature is that I wanted every character to have a "specialty", some mechanic like revival or area-effect attacks that only they could do. This was to increase each character's value in the player's mind and ensure everyone was useful in at least some situations. I wanted each character to provide that sense of "Oh man, I was looking for that/this'll make things so much easier!" you feel when you find certain upgrades in Metroidvanias.

The "joke" abilities were a pretty spontaneous idea; Farla was listening to anime AMVs and started talking about One For All in _My Hero Academia_, and I decided that would be a really cool name for an ability. We debated what it would do for a little while before Farla convinced me it would make the most sense as a joke ability for Pearl, letting her guard someone but setting her Defense to 0. To avoid favoritism, Farla came up with joke abilities for all the other gems too.

Characters having innate ailment tolerances was something I came up with quite late, after the prologue was already released. While playtesting the final boss and getting whammied with his mass debuff attack all the time, I realized that my policy of only giving the player one of each badge might make status protection a bit too limited, so I wanted to throw people this bone. Stevonnie was already immune to two ailments, so I thought it was reasonable.

### Stevonnie

I had always planned for Stevonnie to be fused the whole game, so the personality-switch mechanic was one of the first things I came up with. I wanted Steven to be the best healer and Connie to be the best fighter, with the idea that you would want to switch to gain access to their awesome abilities but that their hyperspecialization could leave you in a tight spot. The idea for Stevonnie expanding their list of shared skills over time came from _Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass_, where Jimmy's base form starts with no special abilities, but he can fill his slots with abilities he learns over the course of the game.

In practice, I think I bungled the balance here pretty badly; in my playthrough I naturally grabbed all of Steven's support skills first and then used Stevonnie primarily as a healer, and I suspect most players did too because that's how jRPG players are taught to operate. You were supposed to gain more freedom to switch personalities as you gained more characters to fill the roles of healer and fighter, but perhaps I didn't balance that as well as I hoped. Perhaps I should have had more Connie- and Steven-only abilities, or at least not allowed Stevonnie to master so many, thus making them technically superior to their component personalities... Agh, oh well. You were _supposed_ to see Stevonnie as really awesome and overrely on them in the early game and then be forced to use other characters more as they got sicker, but I don't think anyone ever quite got to step 1 in the first place. Maybe I should have given them more useful offensive abilities, like a boss killer? I dunno.

Corruption having gameplay consequences was planned from early on, but the exact details went through a few iterations. Originally, Farla suggested making it cut off certain abilities, but I said that didn't work with an RPG's conceit of gaining more abilities over time -- what would that look like, you learn a skill and then immediately lose it forever? I saved that mechanic for the final dungeon, where by virtue of being the endgame I had more leeway to screw with the player. (I did actually initially consider the final regular corruption penalty to be locking off Rose's Shield and Supernova, and that actually made it into the earliest versions of the game, not that you could get corruption high enough to see it; but I quickly changed it due to the "I learned an ability and then immediately lost it, WTF?" problem.) Using the corruption penalties to limit personality switching seemed a much better compromise; it would naturally encourage the player to rely more on other characters, while still making switching viable with more characters to pick up the slack.

Originally, Rose's Shield was planned to be called "Assured Aegis" as a reference to _Null Regrets_. I'm glad I nixed that, it was too pretentious.

The aesthetic I settled on for Connie's abilities was that she would have one ability from each of the main Crystal Gems, though with her own twist, making her an offensive jack-of-all trades. I think this was really cute and shows how much she appreciates the gems, which is nice because that's not an area often explored by the show or by fandom.

Let's look at some of the abilities left on the cutting room floor! Steven had another healing ability called "Pep Talk" that was a full heal; this was back when healing was still relative, so Encouragement was to be a 50% heal and Pep Talk 100%. He similarly had better revival abilities as well: "Lacrimosa" was going to be a 50% revive (Lick was a 25% revive at this point), and "Mourn" or "Grieve" would be a full-party revive that either stunned him or was only usable once per battle. He also had Rallying Cry and an unnamed better version that was twice as good. (I find it a little surprising that I did not actually think of a status cure until the initial release was almost out, especially since that's one of his abilities in _Attack the Light_.) Connie had a bunch of multi-hit abilities cribbed from Flynn from _Last Scenario_; this was back before I settled on the damage formula and realized multi-hit abilities would be meaningless. She also originally had an armor-piercing attack, and an attack that inflicted both ATK and DEF Down that I called "Feint". I was initially not sure if I wanted her ultimate skill to be a single-target nuke or a crowd clearer, and I have a big paragraph waffling over if I even need to choose or if I should do something like dividing the damage by number of targets so the crowd clearer could pull double duty. Motivational Speaker was also planned to be a passive ability rather than a badge, but I decided that was unnecessary.

### Jasper

I decided on Jasper being the tank pretty quick; the ludonarrative dissonance of relying on a hated foe to protect you was just perfect, and that role also makes sense as your first guaranteed party member.

Jasper starts with 2 more stat points than other characters, and ends up gaining an additional stat point by level up due to getting one fewer ability upgrade through level up. This is to make you more reliant on her, and to cement her role as the tank in the early game before you have the chance to allocate a lot of stat points.

Jasper actually doesn't have many cut abilities; coming up with abilities turned out to be the hard part with her. I cut a toggle ability for her that would double aggro gain like the Threaten ability in _Dragon Age_, as well as a proper "reduce personal aggro" ability, though I would end up repurposing that for her joke ability. Diamond Guard originally drew all attacks like the Princess' super defense in _The Tenth Line_, but I dismissed that as being too similar to Rose's Shield. Her desperation attack proved the hardest to name; for a while, all I could think of was "Compression", like star compression? That's a thing, right? It was Farla who came up with "Event Horizon" (because it involves passing closer and closer to the point of no return, see).

Ultimately, despite my attempts to make her the star, I think Jasper ends up lagging behind in the endgame. Even with a heavy defensive build, she just can't build aggression and survive attacks at the same time. (But I'll get into that more further down.) Bully was intended to make a more balanced build viable, but I do think you end up forced to pump everything into Defense to make her survive.

### Peridot

Peridot was fun. I started from the premise that she should be the healer, because if gem healing is based on optimism and emotional outlook, she should be a champ at that. Infectious Enthusiasm came from that, and I decided that would be her "specialty". I also took the canon line that "Peridots don't poof easily" to mean that she has high HP -- but because she's a noncombatant, I paired it with terrible Defense to really stretch the boundaries of my mechanics. Her having a charged attack fit well with being the healer, because I always feel that healers should be allowed to make meaningful damage contribution but have to jump through additional hoops to do so. Letting it contribute to Bismuth's abilities was Farla's idea; I liked that because it advanced the cooperation theme.

Peridot starts with 2 fewer stat points than other characters to reflect that fact that she's a noncombatant and reinforce her role as a "squishy wizard". She can mitigate this deficiency by relying on her abilities instead: She can mitigate her poor Defense with Metallic Shield, and she can mitigate her poor Attack by saving for the stronger levels of Metallic Strike. But she's still more fragile than the other characters overall, and you have to be careful with her. Peridot has the most lopsided natural stat growth in the game: she chooses HP every other level, and only very rarely chooses Defense. More incentive to get her early so you can course-correct her terrible decisions!

(Fun fact: Peridot was where I realized I needed to implement stat caps, because her automatic stat progression put her over 100 HP and that made me say, "Hey, wait a minute...")

I spent a little while workshopping the exact statistics of Metallic Strike; I wanted to reward players for saving up by making it stronger than if you had just been using a 100% power attack for those turns. I think I settled on a really good system: the _acceleration_ of the rate of change also increases, instead of the rate of change being constant. So from 0 to 1 is a 120% increase in power; from 1 to 2 is a 140% increase; and from 2 to 3 is a 160% increase. (This actually ends up making a 3-point Metallic Strike stronger than Singularity, though in practice Garnet's higher Attack still makes her come out ahead.)

Originally Peridot also had Rallying Cry and Pep Talk, but those got cut when I settled on the 4-skill limit. She also had another candidate for her joke skill: she would surf the web to find out the enemy's weakness, but waste several turns getting distracted by Twitter. I cut this because I couldn't figure out a good way to implement the "reveal enemy's weakness" part; stat information is already free.

I think Peridot ended up mostly well-balanced, but I believe her high HP made her a bit sturdier than she should have been. Maybe I shouldn't have let you get the Confidence Badge in the same area you get her -- she's the obvious candidate for it, and I think that's what tips it over the edge. Maybe I should have barred her from wearing it? But that's hard to justify flavor-wise.

### Garnet

Garnet was a character I knew I had to keep my eye on. In _Attack the Light_, she is a gamebreaker: She can do (nearly) everything the other gems can do but better, giving you no reason to ever use anyone else. My change to a one-action-per-character economy would at least prevent that level of exploit, but I still wanted to make sure she wasn't too powerful.

Right off the bat, I committed to her being focus fire: no AoE. This was one of the reasons she was so overpowered in _Attack the Light_; in addition to having stronger regular attacks she had good AoE, giving players no incentive to use poor Amethyst. So no, that's straight out. Her other abilities (DEF debuff and single-target nuke) were in keeping with the theme, though, so they got to stay. For her basic attack, I initially conceived of giving it greater dependence on the _difference_ of Attack and Defense rather than Attack alone; but my system of keeping enemy Defense relatively low made that always skew in the player's favor, so I made it more controlled by only putting the amplifier on the Attack stat.

That actually left me with a quandary. I needed one more ability than she had in _Attack the Light_, yet I had already cut one of them. Coming up with more abilities for her actually proved difficult! There are only so many spins you can take on "do damage". I hypothesized a dispel attack (pointless because so few enemies used buffs and they could be canceled by debuffs anyways), a cast-from-HP attack (seemed a bit extreme for Garnet, and too similar to Singularity and Shooting Star), and a berserker stance of some kind (burn more SP for more damage? Doesn't really work with a communal system and leans too close to making Garnet the center of the universe again). None of these really panned out. I eventually got an idea from a roguelike RPG called _Bonfire_ that had very streamlined character roles: The character whose only role was doing damage had an ability that let him counterattack every enemy that attacked that round, and I thought, hey, that works! It fits perfectly with her future vision ability, and while it's something of a violation of the no AoE rule, it's a "soft" enough AoE that I think it's fine.

Crescendo was the last ability I came up with. I had seen a few abilities like it in other RPGs, and I thought it fit well with her aesthetic. To keep it under control, and to avoid it potentially outstripping Singularity, I capped its total power.

Garnet trades one point each of HP and Defense for two more starting points of Attack. In her natural level ups, she slightly favors Attack.

I think I succeeded at my goal of keeping Garnet balanced, for the most part. She has great damage output, but is limited enough by her Star Point costs that she's not a gamebreaker. One thing is that I don't think I made Crescendo viable enough; it's almost never worth the cost over her regular attack that generates SP. In the early game you're unlikely to have enough SP to use it, and in the endgame you're more likely to burn your SP on Singularity. Maybe if I had more granularity in SP cost and generation it would have worked better.

### Amethyst

Amethyst's specialty was to be crowd control. Her basic attack is weaker, but hits a full row of enemies. She also possesses a hit-all ability, though it was to be weaker and more cost-efficient than Supernova, with the expectation being that you would use it more. (_Boy_ did I turn out to be wrong about that, but more on that later.)

Like Garnet, I had a lot of trouble coming up with abilities for her. Dual Strike is a weird attack that doesn't work in a system where multiple attacks don't mean anything, and I really don't like instant kill attacks, so I made her spin ball into just a regular do-more-damage attack. (I actually did conceive of giving it instant kill abilities through an upgrade, but I just couldn't think of a way to do it that satisfied me, especially since I oppose random-chance mechanics. Auto-kill if they're 3 levels lower than her? Simultaneously too useless and too exploitable, I felt.) I initially opposed this because I don't like abilities that are just "the same, but more" and Singularity was already single-target focus fire, but I decided that Shooting Star's lower cost would make it usable more often and therefore qualitatively distinct. It also fit well with her basic attack being weak against individual foes; she could use her whip to "charge up" a stronger focus fire attack if she was fighting a particularly tough opponent.

For her final ability, I also ran through a lot of ideas. Stronger row strike (redundant with Nova and Crashing Skies), dispel (again), and damage-over-time (doesn't work as a player ability the way I conceived it). I eventually settled on stun -- that fits with the crowd control theme, and was an ability of Pearl's in _Attack the Light_. Once I came up with the Grappled effect, it became an even better idea -- you could use Amethyst to punch holes in the enemy's defenses and gain access to back-row enemies, again a good crowd control thing. I spitballed having the stun attack do damage as well, but chose to keep it simple.

Amethyst trades two points of HP for two points of Defense, making her the opposite of Peridot. She has poor self-image and a weak form, but she's scrappy and can survive attacks that should put her out.

In my test runs, poor Amethyst ended up poofed more often than not, so I didn't get to use her too much. I feel like she falls just slightly behind everyone else; I didn't find it easy to justify spending SP on her moves, other than Shooting Star. I did sometimes use Crashing Skies, but never found it very impressive. Maybe I should have made it stronger. I hardly used Suplex at all; with how quickly you can just outright defeat enemies, I just never found it worthwhile over an attack. Maybe I should have made it stun for multiple turns? I feared that would get OP if you ended up outnumbering your opponents, though.

### Pearl

Pearl is the "rogue" -- she possesses situational abilities that are very useful but only some of the time. This is a role I think _Attack the Light_ could have committed to more; there, she's basically just an inferior Garnet.

Pearl's basic attack was the one I deliberated over the most. I used the same "quick strike" she had in _Attack the Light_, but in this system that translated to giving her two attacks for free. But with lumped weighting, multiple hits don't mean anything, so I had to find another way to distinguish it. I settled on the same function it had in _Attack the Light_: She could finish off a weakened foe with a cheap attack to free up your stronger fighters for the main course. However, in this system, there was another wrinkle: Basic attacks generated Star Points, so does her attack count twice for that, or does the second hit not generate points? In the end I decided that giving her double SP generation made the most sense. This allows her to play a support role for the others while also potentially turning it to her own advantage, which is fitting for her character. (However, to balance it, her attack has to be weaker than other characters', making her something of a "squishy wizard".)

Pearl made the most sense for interacting with the tactical positioning system: A column strike fit her spear throw perfectly, and her energy blast makes sense as a ranged attack. (I called it "Meteor" instead of "Fireball" because I don't pigeonhole cool ideas into bland RPG tropes, _Attack the Light_.) Focus was something I had seen in other RPGs that fit with her both thematically and mechanically.

That only left one ability. _Attack the Light_ gives her Holo-Pearl, which is a stun, but I already gave that to Amethyst. One ability I considered was "Encore", which would transfer her action to another character, and possibly other benefits such as Focus; Farla nixed this on the grounds it wasn't actually in-character for Pearl to completely defer her action to another, and I concurred when I did the math on what a Focused Singularity would look like and despaired. After realizing we had too few of them, we ended up settling on an armor-piercing ability, which took me an embarrassingly long time to come up with such an obvious name for.

I think I like how she turned out. I mostly used her as a battery, but got significant use out of her other abilities too. I worry that I might not have made Eclipse worth the cost, but with Quick Strike and Focus it can still be pretty strong.

### Bismuth

Bismuth was always intended to be purposefully overpowered; she is designed to be the hardest gem to recruit, but rewarding if you can get her early. To this end, she has 3 more stat points than average and her natural stat distribution is perfectly balanced. Her specialty is stat buffs; your only other means of getting those are through items.

I had a _lot_ of planned abilities for Bismuth; she was meant to be a jack-of-all-trades who could take on any role in addition to having her own specialty. So she had Jasper's aggro control, Peridot's healing, Amethyst's crowd control, and Garnet's damage. Obviously, I had to _significantly_ roll that back when I committed to the 4-skill limit. (I still broke the limit for her anyway, though! I could have cheated and made Armory of Ages/Armor of the Fallen one skill in the menu that branched into options for ATK or DEF, but eh, couldn't be bothered. She's my favorite, deal with it.) I initially conceived of some kind of "armor crusher" skill that didn't just pierce Defense but actually did _more_ damage the higher the enemy's Defense, but I swapped it for Revolution after deciding that was too hard to implement. Otherwise, her moveset remains pretty unchanged from initial conception. The only one I was uncertain about was Hone because it might throw off the 4-skill limit, but I threw it in anyway.

The biggest feature I cut from her was "All For One", the intended counterpart to Pearl's "One For All". It was to be a "limit break" combination attack that became stronger with every gem you had recruited, likely involving fusion. For the curious, my outline describes this as:

  * Garnet does a huge hit to the target + DEF debuff
  * Amethyst does her hit-all attack
  * Pearl adds DoT if she has that skill and/or hits the column of the target
  * Jasper just does a strong hit
  * Peridot does a weak hit but gets so into it that everyone regains HP
  * Stevonnie… ??? Maybe different depending on if Connie or Steven is at the wheel
  * Bismuth finishes with a strong hit-all and/or an all-buff

...So yeah, this never got very far. I ended up not bothering with it because it would have been way too much effort for something that likely would have just been even more work to balance, and it was becoming clear by that point that the player hardly needed more overpowered abilities. (It definitely would not have competed with Bismuth's 4 star abilities, though. She'd probably be outraged at all this special treatment if she knew. :3)

The aesthetic behind Bismuth is that she's defined by her relationship to others: Her two attacks are based on her enemies' strength, and their low intrinsic power means she gains less from her own buffs than her allies do. I thought this extremely clever.

I think I succeeded at my goals with Bismuth. Shifting Strike is just slightly better than most attacks on average, and her buff and healing abilities are extremely useful, and potentially game-changing. Possibly I made her too good, but I'm not bothered by that~

## Area Design

This was undoubtedly the hardest part of this whole project. Systems, numbers, characters, those all come easy to me, but tell me to design an area and my brain goes blank. Maybe I'm just not as good at spacial reasoning, or maybe I just don't have as much experience developing visual skills. Unlike with battle mechanics, I never notice the intricacies of area design in RPGs -- truthfully, I don't pay it any attention at all. I suppose that's a testament to how well those designers did their jobs, but it makes it hard for me to consciously reverse-engineer it and make the important creative decisions myself.

Believe it or not, I didn't even have a clear idea of what each gem's location was going to be as late as the prologue release! I was initially worried they'd have to be random generic areas like in _Attack the Light_, but things aligned pretty quickly once I actually thought about it. The Barn for Peridot was obvious, but for the others I started by listing out the areas from _Attack the Light_: the Strawberry Battlefield, a cave area, a desert area, an underwater area, and an industrial area. I realized that I could align several of those to areas we were already familiar with: The Kindergarten makes for a good cave area, there's an existing desert in the show (which may well have been what the Orange Zone was supposed to be anyway), and Bismuth's forge was a perfect industrial dungeon. Mapping Amethyst to the Kindergarten was obvious, and the desert made sense for Pearl due to its ties to Rose. That left the Strawberry Battlefield for Garnet, which I think fits her too.

I was initially unsure how to space out treasures in the dungeons. _Attack the Light_ positively drowns you in them, but that dilutes their value and makes the game practically impossible to lose. I quickly decided I instead wanted a _Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass_ approach where consumable items were extremely rare and treasure chests were almost exclusively reserved for equipment. So I designed all the badges first, and then decided how I wanted to partition them. It turned out they actually divided up mostly evenly, which worked out for me. Because the areas could be completed in any order, I decided the only sensible approach was to give every dungeon a consistent loadout: a DoT resistance badge, a debuff resistance badge, and a stat boost badge. The specific badges would be tied to the order you got them in rather than to specific areas, such that you would always get the Sword Badge on your first "Attack badge" chest, then the Quartz Badge on your second, etc., regardless of what area you were actually in. I had four tiers of resistance badges and three tiers of stat boost badges, which required a bit of finagling to line up properly; I settled on giving the Forge no resistance badges but two stat boost badges, which made the numbers work out. Special badges _would_ be tied to area, based on what was thematically appropriate.

### Peridot: The Barn

My original idea for this was a hedge maze. That immediately fell apart as soon as I sat down to design it and realized I had no idea how to make mazes. (It would also have been really boring in text, most likely.) I was sad for a while, then decided to figure out something different. I rewatched Gem Harvest to get a sense of what the area around the Barn looked like, and compiled a list of all the crops we see Lapis and Peridot growing. From there, I realized I could divide-and-conquer the design by separating it into multiple mini-dungeons each themed around a different plant. It took me a little while to figure out the gimmick for the apple orchard; I spitballed a few half-baked ideas before Farla suggested the idea of Peridot attacking the player throughout. I was initially opposed to this because my system didn't enable lasting damage between battles, but it was such a good idea I just buckled down and coded it in anyway.

Coding the cornfield was an, uh. Experience. I initially made separate passages for all 16 tiles, because even though most of them were identical, the navigation buttons had to point to different locations in each one. This was very stupid and I later replaced it with the better system I designed for the Desert.

To an experienced designer it's probably obvious that the Barn was my first dungeon. Each of the mini-dungeons consist of very linear, simplistic paths. I also did not incorporate the gem-collecting sidequest well at all -- in the original release, you get 3 of the 5 pieces automatically, which doesn't make for much of a search! I later moved one of the gems from a mandatory battle in the tomato patch to an optional battle in the cornfield, so that at least a majority of the gems had to be actively searched for.

Dividing the first dungeon up this way turned out to be advantageous for me. I realized that each of the gimmicks I designed for the mini-dungeons could be expanded into a full dungeon, and each fit tonally with the areas I had picked. For the Strawberry Battlefield, a gauntlet of lasting damage; for the Kindergarten, a spiralling, claustrophobic maze; for the Desert, a wide open area. Area design progressed much faster once I figured this out.

### Garnet: The Battlefield

Initially, I actually did not make the entire area into one gauntlet. I instead made it a shorter dungeon where each node forced you into a "chain" of 2-3 continuous battles, after which you could recover and move onto the next. I got this idea from [Teenage Costume Squad](https://rpgmaker.net/games/5703/), a Craze masterpiece you should absolutely play. However, in playtesting I realized this was too easy. The chains were never longer than the apple orchard sequence itself, and without the addition of the apple traps the damage just couldn't build up enough to be threatening.

I realized I had to make the whole thing a gauntlet, but had trouble justifying it storywise. With how quickly and easily gems recover, how could I contrive a convincing reason why they had to keep going forward without rest? It was Farla who suggested I expand on the PTSD scene to make Jasper force the player onwards throughout. This actually worked out really well, as it gave me opportunity to flesh out Jasper a bit more too.

I was pleased with the trick of hiding a bonus area behind the starting area (even if it's not very "hidden"). That's something I've always found clever in video games.

### Amethyst: The Kindergarten

This one was probably the easiest to design. I just started sketching out a floorplan I thought looked interesting, and just kept sketching until I was done. I was able to come up with the idea for the door puzzles pretty quickly -- I was inspired not just by the keystones in _Attack the Light_, but by the chromatic doors in _Virtue's Last Reward_. Writing the scenes discussing additive vs. subtractive color mixing was fun, especially since I got to bring other gems into the conversation.

Originally, Lapis actually could pick you up from underground. I did this for gameplay reasons, but beta testers said it didn't make sense, so I changed it.

The idea for the "spiral" areas -- both the path to the red keystone and the path to Amethyst -- was repeated from the tomato patch. You might not have noticed it, but the "screens" for those areas don't properly match up if you draw them out -- the final section overlaps with the first if you superimpose all the areas in the dungeon onto a 2D grid. I thought this was a fun subtly disorienting effect.

### Pearl: The Desert

For this one, I started with the idea that you would have to chase Pearl across a large area and fight minibosses while she flew away to the next location. The only tricky part was coming up with meaningful locations for the encounters. Rose's junk pile was obvious, but we don't know much else about the desert in canon. About the only other thing we get from there is the desert glass, which Lion was apparently associated with. I used that weak link to justify giving Lion a cameo here, and that was just barely enough to work as a second special location. For the third, I just rolled with the idea the Earth is covered in lost gem tech and threw in a derelict ship.

I also came up with the idea for the ravine very early; it seemed a fairly obvious feature to include. The encounters there were added to prevent "cheating"; obviously if you encountered the ravine you'd just go north until you reached the end, so I included hard encounters all along that path to incentivize you to find another way around. I don't know how well this worked.

I really like the little encounter on the northern edge that's all satellites. I liked imagining how these subservient creatures might behave with nothing to imprint on; an interesting reflection on Pearl, to be sure.

I was worried this area would be too empty, but after I placed those important locations I actually found it filled up pretty well! If anything, I worry that it might be too small -- should I have included more on the eastern side?

The coding side of this took a bit of creativity. I knew I didn't want to repeat the nightmare that was the cornfield for an even bigger area, so I did something more efficient this time: I stored the player's X and Y coordinates on the map as variables, converted them into a single string, and fed them into a switch statement that determined if you were on a special tile or not. You never actually move between passages in this area: the navigation arrows only adjust your X or Y coordinate and redirect you to the master passage, where the switch determines your actual location. This allowed me to lump all empty tiles under a single default passage, rather than having to make separate passages for all 49 tiles.

### Bismuth: The Forge

Hoo boy. This was the hard one.

Going in, I had the idea of the three minibosses... and nothing else. I was out of gimmicks from the Barn and since this was the "final" dungeon, I wanted to make it special. I thought of a few ideas:

  * Something like the conveyor tiles from the Team Rocket headquarters in _Pokemon_. When you attempt to move in one direction, you are turned around somewhere else. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in a text-only environment where location and direction are completely abstract to begin with.
  * A mutually exclusive lock/key puzzle, with multiple classes of doors, only one type of which can be unlocked at a time. You've probably seen this in one RPG or another. Once again, this doesn't really work in text.
  * Something something falling down to lower floors, like those "cracked floor" puzzles. Again, doesn't work without visuals.

When none of these panned out, Farla had the realization that we should be looking to tabletop RPGs for our puzzles, because those are pure description. She showed me a few puzzles that I considered, but unfortunately, none of them felt right. I wanted to tie this puzzle thematically to Bismuth, not just have a random riddle or contrived switch puzzle.

Finally I thought, well, this is taking place in a forge, why not make the player build something? From my background in chemistry, I knew a little about metallurgy, chiefly that it was really complicated and involved a lot of variables. This made it an excellent topic for a puzzle -- and I could even make it educational, too! (Thanks to the metallurgy subreddit for answering my questions about this.) I was also inspired by the puzzle game _Zoombinis: The Logical Journey_, a beloved piece of my childhood. One of that game's most famous puzzles involves combining multiple toppings to create a pizza that will appease a troll; the troll will only accept one combination of toppings, determined randomly in each game. I realized I could model my puzzle on the same structure.

### Steven: The Room

I debated the exact mechanics of how I wanted this to work for a while. I initially conceived of it as a more standard dungeon, with enemies based on twisted reflections of the gems. However, once I realized the only way to make it work in-story was to put it past a point of no return, I knew I didn't want to make it too expansive, and once I came up with the idea for the boss rush too, well... six long, hard boss fights in a row seemed more than enough.

The boss rush seems an obvious concept in retrospect, and I'm surprised I didn't think of it from the start. Since the areas can be completed in any order, I had to design different stat layouts and mechanics for the bosses for each stage; but the player will only see one in a given playthrough. So hey, why not show off what they look like at max power? I already designed it, after all!

## Enemy Design

This was tricker than designing the characters. I knew I wanted the game to be nonlinear and modular, which means I had to make every enemy viable at every stage in the game. On the stat front, this wasn't too hard; player characters had very simple and concrete stat growth patterns, so I could easily keep enemies on par. However... the player also got new abilities by level up, so I had to increase the complexity of enemies over time to match. I am... not sure if I actually accomplished that. Most enemies have the same skillsets throughout the whole game, with stage improvements mostly just making them slightly stronger (increasing debuff duration, Interference upgraded to Disharmony, etc.). I believe the only completely new ability enemies get is cracking, which only appears at stage 4. Overall, despite my attempts, I do think I unconsciously created "feature creep" and ramped up the complexity in the order I designed the areas. Oh well -- it was my first rodeo, live and learn.

In terms of exact balance, I initially shot for an average hit-to-kill ratio of 4, with some tank enemies going up to 5 or 6. I bumped this average up about 1 in the final rebalancing effort, which I will discuss later.

Because of the modular design, I wanted to establish consistent structure between the areas, which meant a constant number of enemy types. I settled on 4 because _Attack the Light_ did the same, and that seemed reasonable for a game of this scale.

This constraint helped a lot, and I was able to slot most enemies into consistent roles. I started every area by making a basic "tank" enemy with high defense and poor offense: pumpkins (Barn), caterpillars (Battlefield), crawlers (Kindergarten), satellites (Desert), and shards (Forge). These enemies typically had very simple behaviors, as their purpose was more to act as chaff to protect other enemies than to really threaten you. I also knew that, obviously, the enemies should mirror their mother gem's own abilities, making for a neat preview of both the boss battle and what abilities you'll get yourself. Typically, I broke this down among the remaining three (or all four) enemies, giving each of them one ability:

  * In the Barn: Flowers have Peridot's healing ability. Tomato cannons have Peridot's charged attack ability, but not the accompanying defensive buff. Runners have a defensive buff, but no corresponding attack.
  * In the Battlefield: Caterpillars inflict DEF Down, jumpers have Pummelling Strike and their combo attack mimics the functionality of Crescendo, and weavers have Future Vision.
  * In the Kindergarten: Crawlers have row AoE and stun, monsters inflict ATK Down, bats have Shooting Star, moles have mass AoE. (All these enemies also have different counterattacks, which preps you for Amethyst's more dangerous one.)
  * In the Desert: Satellites have One For All and spread attacks, dragons have Eclipse, and birds-of-paradise have column AoE.
  * In the Forge: The weapons all have Hone, swords have a defense piercing attack, Justice has Revolution, and the minibosses have mass buffs.

Aesthetically, I also chose to make at least one enemy a miniature version of the mother gem's corrupted form, as another preview. For Peridot, this is the runner; for Garnet, these are the jumper and butterfly; for Amethyst, this is the monster; for Pearl, this is the satellite; and for Bismuth, this is the shard.

Serpents in the Desert were probably the enemy I had the most reservations about. I worried that giving them nothing but a complete suicide attack would make them too easy, especially if I didn't make them strong enough to consistently poof you in turn. I also had to figure out how to handle their interactions with Bubble and Thorns, since obviously those skills would trivialize them. It seems to have worked out in the end, though?

The boss fights were easy in some aspects but hard in others. The bosses themselves were pretty easy to design, since I had already designed the abilities they would have as characters. However, due to the large party size, every boss had to not only have flunkies but have some way to renew them to keep the player on their toes through a long battle. I also wanted to give every boss a unique gimmick and personality, so every boss has a unique method of flunky summoning: Peridot does a mass revive, but infrequently; Garnet can only summon one at a time; Amethyst's tails regenerate on their own; Pearl only revives her minibosses, but Son of the Sun can revive the ordinary flunkies; and Bismuth fights alone but gets multiple attacks per round. I thought these were all fitting for their characters.

I had the idea for Bismuth's instant kill attack from very early on; it was probably the first concrete idea I had for her. I don't normally like instant kill attacks, but come on, it's Bismuth, I _had_ to do it. I throttled it with long cooldown and very predictable behavior: She always uses it if she's able, but has to spend a turn setting it up, and the attack itself is a full-round action. It starts with a warmup of 4 turns and cooldown of 5 turns, and that's reduced by 1 every stage (including the Room). I had fun coming up with all the gruesome descriptions -- there is a unique one for every character, including Bismuth herself. Stevonnie's references the death of a certain character in episode 50 of the original _Fullmetal Alchemist_ anime, a scene I found extremely powerful.

A little Easter Egg: If you try to block Breaking Point with a bubble or thorns, she pops it with a weak instantaneous attack before crushing you anyway. If you use Rose's Shield, she skips her turn but will still use Breaking Point on the next. Can't get out of it that easily!

Lapis was more unique, since she's not a playable character. I had a lot of fun with her! The idea of a passive boss that only hurts you through damage reflection is a really interesting one to me. I was inspired by the Usurper boss in _Wine & Roses_, who has a similar gimmick where his only "attack" is to debuff his own defense, thus hurting you more with his damage reflection. (Her modified use of Mutilate as The Drowned is directly inspired by this; the Usurper has a hilariously infuriating ability where, at half health, he heals himself back to full while also self-inflicting a severe defense debuff on himself.) This is also, of course, good for a tutorial boss, because you can only be hurt as a result of your own actions, giving you more room to go at your own pace. The concept of her using her flunkies for both offense and defense was another idea I really liked, and I believe I may have been inspired by the game _Hero Core_, which features a (truly spectacular) boss with a similar gimmick.

I also had a lot of fun designing all the clones for The Drowned. They were refreshingly simple, but still had a lot of personality. Fun fact: Their initial positioning is a mirror of your own formation!

Steven was the hardest boss to design. Because of the way I structured the bad ending, he had to be in the game from the start, before I had any idea of how the game would scale, even though he was supposed to be the final boss. Complicating this was the fact that I actually intended for him to be a relatively _easy_ final boss, but only when fought at the appropriate time -- but also, you lost your healer and reviver for the fight, so his attacks would sting a lot more than in any other fight. Because I just love compounding bad decisions, he _also_ has only one attack per round, so I had to make each individual attack as strong as the equivalent attacks from a whole swarm of flunkies. (This is why he has so many AoE attacks.) Because of all this, I had to adjust him a lot throughout the game. Every time I released a new gem, I tested the battle to see how difficult it was, and if I won, decided if I wanted to make it harder. Currently, it seems like the battle is just barely doable with four gems, decently challenging with five, and relatively easy with six, which I think works out very well.

Steven's "Love" attack has special behavior: In addition to the normal damage mechanics, it adds a flat 10 points to the final damage total, ensuring it really hurts even if you have high Defense. The idea here was to incentivize Jasper to tank, as only she can reduce total damage with her defensive abilities.

Big Freeze was designed to level the action inequality by sharply reducing your party size for several turns. I'm not sure if making crystallized characters invincible was the best idea, as in my playtests he mostly ends up hitting them with Rose's Thorns and Starkiller, thus wasting his turns. But I think it works okay overall.

Steven initially had 300 HP, 30 Attack, and 10 Defense. These were very guesstimated numbers, since I had no idea what endgame enemy stats would actually look like. Once I decided I didn't want to improve enemy defense over time, I cut him down to a low 5 Defense so that even low-level characters could do appreciable damage. I repeatedly buffed his HP and Attack throughout development, before finally settling on 700 HP and 35 Attack. It amused me to make him a glass cannon -- that initially seems out-of-character, but _is it really?_ Steven is constantly pushing himself beyond his limits and recklessly throwing himself into danger on wild, obsessive hopes. Just because he has a shield doesn't mean he's good at protecting himself!

I greatly enjoyed designing all of Steven's abilities. "Big Freeze" and "Big Crunch" refer to hypothesized states of the end of the universe, if you weren't aware.

The Perfect Crystal was also incredibly fun. Since it's an optional battle, I could go absolutely wild with my nastiest ideas. I loved all the unique mechanics I designed for it, and my absolutely uninhibited pretentiousness with all their ability descriptions. (I feel deeply, smugly clever about all the mathematical attacks, especially "Inequality".) Balance-wise it proved a bit tricky; its one-hit-kill attack combined with limited revives effectively gives the battle a time limit, but that time limit will be wildly different depending on how many revival and healing items you have. But oh well, it's a superboss, if you don't stock up before it you have only yourself to blame!

## Corruption Mechanics

I knew from the beginning that the game was going to end with Steven corrupted and that I wanted the player's choices to affect that in some way.

At first, my idea was more delayed-consequence. Your choices throughout the game would determine what happened after healing all the gems: If you made the wrong choices, Steven would desynch from his gem and the corruption would kill him instantly, with the final boss being a corrupted Rose Quartz instead; otherwise, Steven would resonate with the corruption and become corrupted himself, but that would still allow the possibility for him to be saved. (From what I understand, this is similar to the ending branches of _Silent Hill_ \-- I may have been subconsciously inspired for it, though I'm not very familiar with that work.) However, the details of this proved difficult to nail down. What would desynching mean -- behaving differently from Rose Quartz? Punishing the player for that seems athematic, because the entire point is that Steven is his own person and shouldn't be bound by peoples' expectations of him living up to his mother. Moreover, from a gameplay perspective, that could potentially lock players into the bad ending with no way out, without it being clear that's what they're doing.

So I collapsed that down to the second outcome being the one that always happens, with the player choice instead affecting _when_ it happens. As soon as I started designing the healing sequences, things crystallized pretty quick -- I knew I wanted the healings to be a dialogue puzzle, so it followed naturally for the bad options to advance corruption as an additional punishment. The tension would be that if you made too many bad options, Steven would hulk out early and you'd have to fight the final boss before you were ready, leading to an inevitable game over.

However, this quickly ran into issues in actual implementation. If the Bad End threshold was fixed, it would have to be very high (as gems give unavoidable corruption points in addition to the points from bad choices), which would mean this tension would only happen at the very end. Even if I did my math right and it wasn't possible to lock yourself into the bad ending, players would have a very uneven experience where they can make as many bad choices as they want until suddenly the last gem has no margin for error. (Plus, in order _for_ the math to be right, it would have to be impossible to even approach the threshold unless you took nearly every bad option throughout the whole game, meaning that most players wouldn't even notice it.)

So I chose not to make the threshold fixed. Instead it's a sliding scale that increases with every gem you capture. That might not make strict narrative sense, but it worked a lot better for the gameplay.

Farla convinced me to keep the training wheels on for Lapis because she's the tutorial. Her bad options don't give you corruption points. Instead, a separate variable tracks how many of her bad options you've taken, and once you've taken them all, you're given a nice shiny Press X To Die button instead of pushing you into the bad ending automatically.

For the curious, here's the exact formula:

  * Every gem (including Lapis but excepting Jasper) gives you 100 corruption points at the start of their healing sequence. This is unavoidable.
  * Bad options typically give you 20 corruption points, _except_ for Lapis' because she's the tutorial.
    * ..._Except_ the option for badmouthing Jasper, which gives you 10 points.
  * Lying to Ruby or Sapphire gives you 80 points.
  * Throwing Rose under the bus at any point in Pearl's sequence gives you 40 points.
  * Bismuth's bad options give half corruption (10) due to how many more she has; her total worst-case still works out to more points than most gems, I believe.
  * Some options boot you out but don't give any corruption points. Typically, the pattern here is that they're things that would upset the gem but which aren't corruption-y behavior (which is telling the gem how to feel or otherwise trying to control them).
  * The Bad End threshold starts at 170 points, and is increased by 120 (corruption-per-gem plus corruption-per-choice) every stage you clear. The additional 20 gives you a little breathing room; if you really mess up such that you're one choice away from the bad end, you're not stuck like that for every future healing sequence.
  * Corruption penalties start at 200 points and occur every 100 points after that; in other words, you are guaranteed to get at least one per gem, but you can accrue them faster if you make a lot of bad choices.

The exact numbers were mostly arbitrary. I wanted big numbers to give me the option for more granularity if I wanted it, though in the end it turns out I could have chopped a zero off without issue. I think the decision to make corruption-per-choice one-fifth corruption-per-gem was made because there were five bad options for Lapis and so I assumed that would be sort of the standard, though I didn't really commit to that.

From here, I ran into the issue that if you played well, the Bad End threshold quickly become unreachable, removing the tension! Even more problematically, it meant I couldn't always trigger the bad ending when I did alpha testing! So I repurposed the tracking system I used for Lapis and applied it to all gems: if you take all possible bad options, you get the bad ending even if you're not past the point threshold. This makes for better gameplay anyway, as it removes the possibility of cheesing a healing sequence by just eliminating all the bad options.

Designing this was really hard and I'm still not entirely sure if it shook out exactly the way I wanted it to. Was the ratio of corruption-per-gem to corruption-per-choice good? _Should_ I have standardized the number of corruption points you could get from each gem? Should I have spaced the Bad End thresholds and/or the penalty intervals differently? I asked myself those questions a lot. But I haven't gotten any complaints about this, so I guess it's fine???

But really, I would guess that any kind of mechanic like this is going to be hard to balance. Any time you have player choices leading to permanent consequences, and especially if one of those consequences is an instant game over, you have to be very careful not to completely screw them over. I didn't want to be like oldschool adventure games and do the "Only at the end will we tell you your seemingly-innocuous choice 5 hours ago made the game unwinnable, LOL" thing, but avoiding that required careful calibration.

## Experience and Leveling Curves

I'll talk about this briefly, since it's something I struggled with. As players we don't often think about experience requirements in RPGs beyond what we need to reach the next level, but the rate at which you level is actually a very important part of design. Where was I to begin?

Fortunately, I started small in scope with the tutorial, which had only a few battles. The important thing was to determine the ratio of battles to level ups: Where did I want the player to level? The tutorial is very linear, so this was easy to fix. I decided I wanted the player to gain one level on the initial run with just Stevonnie, and then another on the second run. The boss would give the player almost but not quite enough to push them to level 4; if a determined player wanted to grind a bit, they'd be rewarded with that pushing them over the edge.

I had already designed the encounters for the tutorial, so I knew what enemies the player would be facing and where. I started by giving the weakest enemy, the level 1 shark, an arbitrary value of 10 XP, because I like round numbers. I was easily able to devise target values to match my plan from there: You fight four sharks in total on the initial run; that totals 40 XP; so the requirement to reach level 2 is 40 XP. The same logic followed for level 3.

However, the main dungeons required more consideration. Once again, I started with a broad view of the situation and broke it down from there. How many levels did I want the player to get per area, and how many battles did I want between each level? Like most of my other mechanics, I copied the answers from something that already worked: _Attack the Light_. There, I observed a fairly consistent ratio of 4 battles per level and 5 levels per area, with the boss providing one of those five. So that gave me my parameters: 16 battles per area, and roughly every 4 should give enough XP for a level up.

The other key was that the leveling curve looked like a step function: I noticed that the XP requirements increased by very little per level up until the gems got their standard 5 per area; after that, there was a sharp spike before the next plateau. This type of XP curve was perfect for the model used by _Attack the Light_, with clearly-delineated areas that all use different types of enemies. A step curve enforces that area limit on leveling, giving you a smooth progression within the area but making it hard to level grind further without proceeding to the next.

Fortunately, my mechanics already worked very well with this! Enemy party sizes increase by 1 per stage, so they naturally provide a lot more XP. I also added a small XP bonus per level to enforce this further. For simplicity, I gave (nearly) every enemy the same starting value for XP (50) and only relied on this formula to increase XP rewards as the game progressed. This made it very easy to calculate the total XP for every area and mark the leveling points appropriately. Minibosses counted as a standard encounter (though they had slightly more base XP), and Bosses had their XP calculated by a special function that usually returned the full XP required to reach the fifth level. (Bismuth gives 20% more XP than normal to make up for the fact that players may not fight a full 16 battles in her area.) After the fifth level, I spiked the next requirement based on the rewards of the next stage's encounters.

This worked very well! ...For most of the game. I forgot to account for the fact that my model of increasing enemy size by 1 every time growed logarithmically, not linearly. The boost they provided made up a smaller and smaller proportion of the total XP per encounter every time, until the "spike" became negligible at stage 5. I very awkwardly patched this by doubling the XP-per-level coefficient for stage 5 and 6. This ended up creating a _huge_ spike between stage 4 and stage 5, but if the player is progressing through the areas at a normal rate they won't notice, so I think it worked out.

New gems join at the average level of your party, but with no XP towards the next level. The XP boost badges were meant to account for this shortfall, as well as for any missteps I made in my calculations.

Assuming a normal playthrough, fighting every battle in every area once, players should reach the endgame at level 28, two levels below the cap. This leaves some room for leveling up past the point of no return, but not so much the player can't conceivably reach the cap beforehand. I thought this was a good compromise.

## Save Formatting

Beta testers may recall that for a while, save files used the default Twine formatting of just displaying a passage excerpt. But this wasn't ideal for an RPG, where there was a lot of other pertinent information for a save file! RPG Maker games typically show the player's active party, level, and/or location, and games that center around a MacGuffin-style collection quest such as _The Legend of Zelda_ typically display those as well to show your progress. So I wanted to do the same.

I tried fiddling with this for a while, but for various reasons you can't really do this in SugarCube alone, and I didn't know enough of JavaScript to fill in the gaps. Fortunately, the Twine Discord came through, and the SugarCube creator generously wrote a script for me that did exactly what I wanted. You can see it in the source code or on his GitHub [here](https://gist.github.com/tmedwards/420f45cb8041b88d091b812a4b0e600e).

Creating images for the gems was by far the most time-consuming part of this. I originally planned to cut corners by just using Unicode symbols for the requisite geometric shapes, but discovered that the spacing and sizing for them was wildly inconsistent. To look nice, I had to design my own images that had consistent sizing. I did this in Paint, which conveniently has options for making geometric shapes, but it was still excruciating to get everything right. Bismuth and corrupted Jasper in particular took AGES and I hope you appreciate them.

Visual design is a nightmare and every time I so much as look at it I feel so validated in my choice to go text-only. Give artists your respect, players.

The other cool thing I did with this was that the gems are displayed in the order you got them, which allows you to distinguish between save files for different runs. Since the gems are both your party members and your MacGuffins, I got to kill two birds with one stone there.

## Testing and Changes

They tell you no game survives contact with the player, but you don't realize just how true that is until you make one.

As you can see in the changelogs, I was constantly tinkering with gameplay even right up until the end. I took my beta testers' feedback very seriously and combined it with my own experience in my test runs to see what worked and what didn't.

The first complaint I got was near-unanimous: BATTLES ARE TOO SLOW. WHY SO MUCH CLICKING. WHY DO WE HAVE TO CONFIRM AND MANUALLY END TURNS. I informed people that links and buttons can be clicked through with the Q key, but the cries still came back: TOO SLOW!!! So I relented, and added options that made the confirm phase optional and auto-forwarded you to the next round when every character had acted. (That created _quite_ a few interesting bugs that were a huge pain to solve. The things I do for you people!) _Still_ people said: WHY DO WE HAVE TO CLICK OUR TARGETS. WHY SO MUCH CLICKING. I said, you can use the number keys as targeting hotkeys. They said, but your enemy layout is totally non-intuitive for that. I said, this is true, but I don't know how to fix it, so deal with it. Later, around the release of stage 3, learned more CSS and realized I actually could fix it, so I did, by adding indices to the characters on the targeting screen.

Of course, people still complain that the game is too slow, but I think I've done as much as I can. You'll just have to learn some patience.

The next complaint I got was that the stage 2 battles were too repetitive. See, initially, Jasper learned Roar before Event Horizon. I thought this made more logical sense, with her learning simpler, more primal abilities first, but from a gameplay perspective it was utterly backwards. So I swapped them in the level order, and now Jasper gains more tactical options earlier. Problem solved.

Things went pretty smoothly from there, until I released the Kindergarten (stage 4). That was the first stage where players could get to really use Stevonnie's ultimate abilities, and at that time, Supernova was extremely powerful, dealing 200% damage. Players discovered that by combining it with Focus, they could oneshot nearly every encounter.

I went through a number of adjustments in an attempt to fix this. First, I nerfed Rising Tides. Back then, it was much more effective than it is currently, giving you 3 SP per MP; with the Magnet Badge, this made it trivial to generate the necessary SP for Supernova in the first few turns. But even nerfed, it was still too easy to rush to Supernova. Next, I decreased the power to 150%, but with Focus it was still too much. Then I increased the cost, but it still proved trivial to generate enough Star Points with Rising Tides. After some consideration, I finally gave up on Supernova being the "ultimate" crowd-clearer, and nerfed it down to 100% power. Initially, my idea was that Supernova would be very powerful but impractical and rarely used due to its high cost, while Crashing Skies would be weaker but could be used more often. However, Focus proved too much of an exacerbating factor with high power values, so I had to swap their functionalities. I hope this doesn't make Supernova too undervalued.

Having just resolved that, I came to realize during the stage 5 beta test that battles were _still_ too easy. I will get more into this in the final section, but I believe it was the large party sizes that screwed me. The hit-to-kill ratios for each enemy remain fairly constant over the course of the game, but you gain more hits per turn as you progress. This ended up meaning you could snuff an enemy in a single turn if you focused. That put the enemies at a disadvantage they couldn't easily recover from, especially considering that you had healing and revival and they didn't. On top of that, Encouragement heals most gems to nearly full health with a single use, and because of the Star Point system, its once-considerable cost was now becoming trivial. It was too easy to erase the enemy's attack while still making progress.

In response, I beefed up the enemies considerably. I gave them bonus HP at the start of every stage in addition to their normal level ups, I gave their attacks steadily increasing power weights up to a considerable 160% at endgame levels, and then I threw in a bonus point of Attack with the stage boost on top of it. Additionally, I added an element of long-term resource management by limiting the amount of times you could use Lick in a single dungeon run -- yes, I added that mechanic that late!

This ended up working okay for the middle stages, but broke horrifically at the upper bounds. In my initial test run of the Forge, enemies were two- or three-shotting even _Jasper_. With six enemies attacking at once, battles became a total crapshoot; even full HP was no guarantee of safety. I realized I needed to scale it back. I chose to go in the other direction, and make the enemies _hardier_ \-- instead of you both blitzing each other, you now both chip away at each other at a more reasonable pace. I removed the stage-start Attack boost and instead increased every enemy's starting Defense across the board; I also modified the stat gains for some of the offense-focused enemies to slow their Attack growth. I think things still get a bit crazy in the endgame, but it ended up a lot more stable.

My final adjustment came from realizing that the reason battles got so unwieldy in the endgame was because enemies all attacked at once, leaving you no way to take a breather in-between. Though I greatly enjoy the free-action system over a turn order system, condensing party actions does lead to this problem of being unable to react to long strings of attacks. I recalled my negative experiences with _Final Fantasy III_: There, bosses got multiple attacks per round that they all used all at once, which proved devastating if they chose to focus fire or chose particularly nasty attacks with their AI roulette. I hated that, and realized I was experiencing the exact same thing with my game!

So then, how to fix it? In a turn-order system, the turns would naturally be spaced out, with some characters going before or after other enemies, but how could I replicate that in a free-action system? Inspiration came to me after listening to _The Adventure Zone: Commitment_, a real-play podcast based on the Fate system. In Fate, turn order is decided by the players: after they finish their turn, the active player says who gets to act next. You're free to pass the ball to all your allies at once, but that means the enemies all act at once as well -- the same situation I had in my game, I realized. After some coding experimentation, I found I could replicate this: The player can choose to end their turn prematurely, and only a number of enemies equal to the characters who have already acted will act. This allows you to space out and react to attacks the same as in a turn order system, but gives the player more control -- the best of both worlds. I am very proud of this mechanic.

My last change was to bump the level cap up to 35. I initially kept it at 30, like in _Attack the Light_, but players reported that the final boss rush was too hard, so I wanted to give them an opportunity to grind if they couldn't beat it.

## Final Thoughts

So, as you can see, the game ended up kind of a mess. That's to be expected from my first attempt, though! Here's how you can learn from my mistakes.

My three biggest problems were: Large party size, elastic difficulty (requiring the monsters level with the player), and healing.

As I said at the start, there are good reasons why most games don't use party sizes this big. The more enemies there are on the field, the wider the spread of possibilities you have to account for. You have to account for every enemy hitting the same character, every enemy hitting a different character, and everything in between. With randomized AI and targeting, battles quickly become chaotic and unpredictable with too many enemies. Do I make sure that characters can survive in the event they're swarmed by all 7 enemies? Or would that trivialize them in the case that they all hit a different person?

I knew this would be a problem and implemented the aggression and guarding systems to give players more control over the outcome, but I don't know if I fully succeeded. With this many characters, I think you need multiple tanks for that to work, but... I really don't give you any options but Jasper. That was _supposed_ to be the point, you were supposed to depend on her and see her as fulfilling a vital and unique role, but I just didn't make her good enough. Even she can't take many hits in the endgame, so it's not really possible for her to protect everyone. Maybe I should have had an additional intermediate between Stonewall and Diamond Guard? Given her more starting HP?

The elastic difficulty also caused problems. I thought it would be simple enough to make enemies grow at the same rate as the characters, with one stat up per level. However, because they never increased their Defense, this resulted in enemies having much higher Attack than the player characters, making them too powerful in most scenarios. (They also gain stat points at every level, while gems skip stats when they gain new abilities.) I figured this would balance out with the fact that the player has a wider and more powerful repertoire of abilities, but I still think the resulting hit-to-kill ratios are too low. If this were a linear game, I could have fine-tuned the enemies for every dungeon, but since the enemies could be fought in any order that was simply untenable. (This did have the nice side-effect of making Bismuth's Revolution particularly good, though.)

Ultimately, I think healing was the biggest problem. Healing in this game is an unlimited resource; no matter how long the battle wears on, you can just keep healing. As party size increased, the only way to maintain tension in battles was to keep pushing enemy damage higher and higher such that you couldn't always outheal it, as you could in _Attack the Light_. But my shared-resource system screwed me there, too. The 2-point cost of Encouragement is a reasonable concern in the early game, but by the endgame, you can easily perform a heal every turn... putting us right back where we started with _Attack the Light_. The only way to outdamage that is to make it possible for enemies to wipe out characters in a single turn, which in actuality just means that healing is useless, since even full health is no guarantee of survival. Even after I scaled that back, HTK is still 4-6 in the endgame, much lower than Craze's recommended 8-10. Because you _could_ heal every turn, I had to _force_ you to -- even though, as a player, I _hate_ that! I have become what I despise. Shame.

I think limiting the uses of Lick helped a bit, but unfortunately, I think it still didn't go far enough -- gems are revived after battle for free, so it's still pretty viable to just blitz the enemy if you start losing gems. In many cases it also punished players for things that weren't their fault, since it's entirely possible for enemies to poof gems even from full health if you're unlucky.

I knew in the abstract that the large party size was going to be a problem I had to plan for in this regard, but I pictured it working out... differently. My idea was that strategy would revolve around using the aggression system to focus damage on a single character, which you could easily heal with Encouragement; it was spreading out damage that was dangerous, and larger enemy parties would naturally result in more spread, organically increasing the difficulty as time went on. Buuut it just didn't work out that way. With how quickly you can take down enemies (often one per turn), I had to allow enemies to do the same to give them any semblance of a fighting chance. Maybe I should have given enemies more health and made battles take longer... but I get so many complaints about the length of the battles as it is, and I have to agree that they do take a while. I can't make every encounter a grueling war of attrition.

If I were to do it over again, I would definitely find a way to make healing limited, and probably decouple it from the Star Point system entirely. Maybe limit it to items only? Or maybe add pressure from a different angle by having no in-battle revives.

But ugh. Healing. I was initially skeptical when I first heard it proposed on the RPG Maker forums that healing should be removed from RPGs entirely, but now I think I'm solidly in agreement.

Also, it wasn't until the very end of the game that I realized the Cracked status was indistinguishable from an instant kill. I am very embarrassed by this, because I hate instant kill attacks! I only intended it to be equivalent to the "petrification" status found in most jRPGs, an indefinite stun, but somehow failed to notice I made the only cure revival abilities. Petrification is only meaningfully distinct because it has different (usually easier) cures! How did I not realize this, dangit! (In this case I don't think there was any elegant way to provide a story justification for it, though.)

But overall, things seemed to have worked out okay. Though I'm very critical of the design, actual players gave very few complaints. I'm pretty proud of the formation system, especially given how much work it was to make.

I'd like to think my greatest quality throughout all of this was my accessibility. I made sure to give every comment a response within the day if not within the hour, and I often provided bugfixes within hours of their reporting. That's important! Indie devs may not have the best resources or the flashiest graphics, but they can show players their responses and feedback matter.

Next up: Story notes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please tell me if there's anything you think I missed or would like specific commentary on.


	27. Artist's Statement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are gonna be spoilers here for the whole game, in case that wasn't obvious. Make sure you've finished it first.

Disclaimer: I have not and never will watch _Steven Universe Future_. The entire plot was conceived before it aired and I did not change anything in response to it. I know generally what happens because y'all will not shut up about it, but talking about it literally makes me physically ill, so please don't. I would hope I made it clear enough why I feel this way in the ending of this work, but if you still don't understand, please watch a Let's Play of the video game _Uncommon Time_ with the knowledge its story fills me with the exact same horror for the exact same reasons.

Anyway.

This work was made as a companion/spiritual successor to my earlier _Steven Universe_ alternate ending fic, _The Darkness Between Stars_. _Between Stars_ was made in direct reaction to the Diamond Days arc, and focused on the conflict with the diamonds and Homeworld. I think I did an adequate job of addressing those elements through it, but the diamonds are just so overwhelmingly and overshadowingly awful that it left me no room to explore anything else. The core of _Steven Universe_ was always the main characters and their traumas, but I had to push those issues aside to focus on the greater conflict, even though I had strong opinions on how they were handled in the ending as well. I tried to cram in as much character study as I could, but I still missed on a lot of deeper opportunities; in particular, I was not able to include Jasper at all.

So that nagged at me. I thought I could use _Between Stars_ to cleanly exorcise all my thoughts, but it hadn't. I needed more. I needed to explore the other half of the story.

Fortunately, things aligned quite well. As I said in the postmortem, I already had the idea for this game kicking around in my head, and when I realized its structure was the perfect format for the kind of character study I desired, the conception fully crystallized. I could push the diamonds aside and take the time to slow down and focus on the people who actually matter, airing my remaining grievances in the process.

In terms of specific inspiration, I was inspired by some "corrupted Crystal Gems" comics that were circulating Tumblr back in the early seasons, though I can't track them down now. They were very sad and I thought it was a great idea for a dark fic.

## Early Conception

Unusually for me, the story wasn't planned out extensively. I knew the premise and general structure – that it would have a modular format revolving around each of the gems in turn – but I didn't have the content of those pieces planned out in advance, and filled in a lot of the details as it came time to write them. I knew generally that I was going to address my grievances with their character arcs in canon and explore their issues more sensitively, but I had only a rough sketch for each going in.

Setting up the story was the hardest part. I needed some way to cleanly get the diamonds out of the way at the very start, but also to have the gems "lose" and be corrupted. I also needed to have Steven be corrupted, but somehow justify why he chose to fuse with Connie anyway.

My original idea for the setup was that Steven would join the gems on the mission, but fail to raise his shield, thus getting corrupted along with the others. The issue _there_ was, if he knew he was corrupted, why would he and Connie agree to fuse? I sketched some possible scenes, but it always felt too forced. Plus, it would have been a lot of really heavy exposition to wade through before the game could even begin.

Farla injected some sense into things by pointing out it made a lot more sense for Steven to not be there at all, especially since he'd disapprove of the plan to shatter the diamonds. I realized that worked _extremely_ well – in addition to getting us on track faster, it would add a sense of mystery throughout the game because you don't know what happened on the mission. It would also establish Steven's uncompromising, controlling behavior and the grit that created with the other characters early on, effectively introducing the themes of the story as a whole. Yes, this was perfect.

The sonicator was also Farla's idea, based on some crystallography facts she had researched for earlier meta.

The idea of using music to heal the corrupted gems was based on a theory video I saw circa season 3 or 4. It was on Tumblr so I again can't find it, sorry. The argument was that, based on the description of the corruption blast as a "song" and the repeated emphasis on music through the show and in relation to gems specifically, Greg and Steven would design their own song that could counteract the corruption. I thought this made a lot of sense – certainly far more than "The only way to help victims is by forcing them to work together with their oppressors!" I sped this along by declaring that Steven was already working on such a song in the months between my divergence point and present day, and finished it while the gems were away.

The idea for each of the mindscapes having the gem physically "bound" in some way was one I came to while designing Lapis' sequence, and realized I liked the imagery of drowning and her binding herself with her own water chains. I thought this worked well as a metaphor for the corruption and mental illness.

  * Lapis is underwater, and bound with her own chains.
  * Peridot is trapped in a deep pit she can't climb out of.
  * Ruby and Sapphire are overwhelmed by their respective elements.
  * Amethyst is tied by her own whip.
  * Pearl is invisible. (This was inspired by The Lonely from _The Magnus Archives_.)
  * Bismuth is broken into pieces.
  * Jasper is buried alive. (This was inspired by The Buried from _The Magnus Archives_, particularly the episode "Entombed".)

I liked coming up with all of these, and feel each one does a good job of personalizing the character and symbolically relating to their trauma.

As I said in the postmortem, I had the idea for Steven being the final boss from pretty early on. I will admit that this mostly came down to gameplay logic: It wouldn't make much sense to never have a chance to use the final character. I didn't originally have the idea for the Room dungeon and the fever dream at this point; that came a little while later, once I started writing and planning the plot more seriously.

## Monster Designs

I knew that coming up with designs for the corrupted gems would be the hardest part. I can't draw and have little in the way of visual design sense (as you can tell by the fact I made a text-based video game), so I didn't have a strong sense of direction to work with.

I started off by looking up corrupted gem designs made by fanartists over the years, but to be frank, they were, uh… bad. Not poorly-drawn, but very, very uninspired. "What if corrupted Garnet looked exactly like normal Garnet but she had an EXPOSED RIBCAGE, because that makes sense for an alien with no bones!" "What if they all had eyes, the one thing we consistently know corrupted gems do not have?" "What if they were all eels?" Just… really random designs that had no logical connection to the characters.

So we basically threw out all of that and just made our own designs from whole cloth. Farla and I approached the designs like writers, thinking about what the animal forms thematically and symbolically represented and how they related to the characters' issues.

Lapis as a sea urchin was Farla's idea. It's a cruel twist of how she always runs away from her problems: she's now so paralyzed by despair that she can no longer even do that. She's just a stationary blob that hurts anyone who tries to get close.

Peridot as a flightless bird made a lot of sense to me. I immediately thought to the "tongue monster" she dealt with in 4x01, and how horribly ironic it would be if she turned into something similar. Thematically, Peridot is a defective gem who lacks clear objective worth in the things Homeworld values, just like how one could see a flightless bird as a failed, worthless creature. It's also a metaphor for her inability to go back; she's cut herself off from the stars in her loyalty to the earth. (This also invited parallels to Pearl when I decided to make her a bird too, which I think works well.)

Amethyst was easy, because the one consistent rule we know is that quartzes always turn into feline or canid monsters. So – a purple puma, and a literal cat-o'-nine-tails. It was also an easy jump to say she's particularly monstrous, because if the corruption targets self-hatred and distortion of the form, she's already full of those issues.

Garnet took the longest to figure out. I thought of a spider because it's visually similar to her normal form – a round, compact body with exaggerated limbs – but couldn't figure out how to tie it in thematically. Other ideas included "some kind of overbred domesticated animal, like Garnet is this creation of Ruby and Sapphire and when it goes wrong it's all exaggerated hips and eyes", and a caterpillar/butterfly combo to represent changing form but being unable to settle on a pure sense of self. (Butterflies also featured in Mindful Meditation, so they're symbolically relevant.) In the end, Farla convinced me that a spider actually made sense for Garnet, because their brains are very weird and can perform very complex behaviors but can only focus on one thing at a time, fitting with Garnet's obsessive focus. I also think it can work for her issue of stress and responsibility, because we romanticize spiders as brilliant chessmasters when they're really just simple beings trying to survive like anyone else.

Pearl was the only one I based on existing fanart. Yeah, she's Bird Mom, I can't really unsee that. But I do think it works thematically too! Her character is very evocative of a bird in a cage; she has so many of her own thoughts, opinions, and desires, but she's limited by her own internalization and the expectations people press on her. I also really liked the imagery of her always flying away but also always coming back, unable to really escape even though she's physically capable of doing so.

Bismuth was a pretty obvious one – she's full of connections to shattering, both in her grief and her willingness to do it to others, so she looks like shards and the shard fusions. But additionally, it demonstrates her goal-oriented personality and belief in direct action -- when her mind is stripped away, what she prioritizes is being able to interact with the world. Her behavior in her dungeon of constantly making new weapons but never being satisfied with them is a metaphor for her uncompromising absolutism in pursuit of her ideals, much like Steven.

Steven was just general body horror. Since he's not fully gem, he only partially transforms and things get weird. Fortunately, like Amethyst he's a quartz so I could lean on that. I think the only significant detail with him is that his hair becomes like Rose Quartz's, which is symbolic of how entangled they are and how he both wants to be her and resents the expectation that he needs to be her.

I came up with the titles for each of the monsters even before their designs, because I am extremely pretentious. I didn't quite settle on the theme of "The [Adjective]" until we had a more solid outline; originally, Peridot and Lapis were called "Mania" and "Despair" respectively. Steven originally had a title as well, "The Prodigal", but I decided it was stronger to just call him by his name.

I originally wanted the titles to be the actual names of the monsters displayed in battle, but Farla said that made less emotional sense and as usual, Farla was right. I compromised by putting the titles in the descriptions, and I ended up getting to have my cake and eat it too with the rematches anyway.

## Flashbacks

Once we came up with the idea of Steven not witnessing the mission, I got very excited at the idea of the player slowly piecing together the mystery through the gems' accounts. The fact that the game is nonlinear means you can assemble the story in any order, so your impression of what happened will change depending on which ones you see first. This reminded me a lot of _Virtue's Last Reward_, which is an excellent mystery game I've heard described as a "Metroidvania of plot".

My ideas for this weren't very solid to begin with. Peridot's and Bismuth's were the first ones I conceived, with the knowledge they were intended as the first and final gems, respectively. I started writing out the whole sequence of events as a coherent story, starting with their departure from Earth and with each gem picking up immediately after the last. I also added in way more drama, positing that the diamonds had already departed to Earth to enact the events of "Reunited" and Pearl had to shapeshift into Rose to aggro them and make them turn around… but that just kept tangling in on itself and running into new problems, like how they didn't get instantly blown out of the sky. These scenes – or the less crazy ones, at least – would eventually become _Dissonant Harmony_, but Farla nixed them on the grounds that they felt too emotionally empty – they said a lot while also not saying much that was important to the characters. It became more about piecing together a mystery than about how it affected the characters themselves, which ran counter to the point of the story.

Instead, we elected not to have the diamonds appear onscreen at all ('cause screw 'em), and have each flashback focus on what was most emotionally important to the gem at the time. This made a lot more narrative sense too as the thing they would be able to hold onto through the corruption.

I'm ultimately quite happy with how this feature played out, and very glad we didn't go with my initial idea. Thank Farla for nipping my dumb tangents in the bud.

## Lapis Lazuli

What frustrated me about Lapis in canon is what her resolution implied. We spend so much of the series establishing that she has genuine traumas and that, while this makes her difficult and inconvenient to deal with, her feelings are valid and she needs to cope with them on her own time instead of always being there for Steven. I thought this was a really good message to take, especially in a kid's cartoon, a format that normally resolves everything quickly and neatly! PTSD is hard and you can't expect people to just get over it when it's convenient for you.

...So of course the show decided to do that after all. (Right after her writer left, too. I can't know anything for certain, but _wow_ does that look mean-spirited.) Lapis doesn't get to have her feelings and space respected, she just suddenly gets over it when the writers get bored of her. And then she is suddenly a fighter who punches stuff with her wings (???) so that she can contribute in exactly the same way as Steven's other friends. Whew, for a second there it looked like we had a unique character! Good thing they beat her into shape at the last minute.

This is why I was so adamant that she not be a battling character. (I hear she _is_ playable in _Unleash the Light_, which gravely disappoints me and further justifies my decision to ignore all canon after A Single Pale Rose.) She's a noncombatant traumatized by being forced to participate in a war and that should be respected instead of forcing her to be useful in the exact way Steven wants.

My original idea was actually not to have Lapis be the tutorial level! She was going to be part of Peridot's area, either fought as a dual boss or having her own separate sub-dungeon. I quickly realized this was a bad idea on every level: She's not as good as getting a new fighter, but at the same time the item shop is a pretty essential feature. And if she was paired with Peridot, that would push players to get Peridot first even more than they already are.

Farla once again came to the rescue by declaring her monster form should be stationary and she could just block the way forward, like an obstacle in a Metroidvania. Perfect!

Lapis' healing sequence was a little difficult to write, because it was the first one and I was still feelings things out.

Initially, I planned for it to be more complex, with you being able to access the memories in any order and each one being a themed chain of events, similarly to Bismuth's shards. Ideas we brainstormed were something involving the first time she got poofed (the scene we see in "Same Old World", with Bismuth), a reflection on how the corruption is keeping her from the others so that's still a form of running away, and something relating to her friendship with Steven in "Mirror Gem", how she chose to use what little power she had to help him and he appreciated that. I quickly realized that I didn't really have enough ideas to develop these, and since it was the tutorial anyway I should probably keep it brief.

The introductory scene of the healing sequence was written very loosely, basically just seeing where it took me. The "This isn't you!" bad option was somewhat spur-of-the-moment, but Farla and I had already been discussing what the bad options would look like and agreed that was a good one. It's echoed in several of the other healing sequences as a general tempting but bad response – it's denying the fact that the issues brought up by the corruption are real and can't just be swept away.

The first memory of her leaving during the events of "Raising the Barn" was one of the more solid ideas I had to work with, so we built off of that. We decided to focus in on the issue of her feeling cowardly and always running from her problems, as that was the thing fandom so unreasonably hated about her and the issue that was resolved so appallingly badly by canon. It was Farla's idea for the resolution to be "It's okay if you can't stay," as that really seemed to get at the crux of the issue: Emotionally, everyone wants Lapis to stay and be dependable, but that's fundamentally selfish and possessive when she has such strong anxiety and PTSD. Assuring her that she's allowed that space and that her friends don't hold that against her – that she's not obligated to be "useful" – seemed like the best thing to do.

We also added a quick divergence into her behavior as Malachite, as another thing fandom unreasonably hated her for was being abusive to Jasper in their relationship, as if that was purely on her because as we all know abuse dynamics must always be evil abuser/innocent victim and can't ever be mutual toxicity. But it's true that she was crueler than she needed to be, especially given that Jasper never explicitly did anything to her personally. Given that Jasper was to be a focus of the story, I thought it a nice tie-in to have her reflect on their relationship.

(I originally planned for the badmouthing Jasper option to be used against you in Jasper's healing sequence, and I even store it in a variable, but I couldn't think of a neat way to bring it up.)

The bad options here are a bit repetitive, maybe, but I felt they were fitting. Giving Lapis general platitudes – that she's strong, that she's better now, that she won't make the same mistake again – seem kind on the surface, but in actuality they're implying that if Steven's wrong, if she _does_ fail him again, then she really is a bad person. That's not truly forgiving her or accepting her for who she is, that's trying to mold her into the person you want her to be, which just confirms her feelings that she's worthless and doesn't deserve you.

This is also where I started conceptualizing "neutral" options that didn't advance the dialogue but didn't kick you out either. Those are definitely a good idea for adding more nuance to the conversation – there are definitely responses it makes sense to give but which aren't relevant to the core issue. Going forward, I would try making these into "hints" that gave additional clarifying information that would hopefully help you pick the right option.

The post-healing scene with Jasper was also spur-of-the-moment! I didn't originally have a plan for how the gems would interact with Jasper, but as soon as I started writing I knew I would have to address that. The conversation led naturally to the question of whether to keep her mindwiped, and I realized that was a great question to pose to the player. I followed this formula for all the other gems.

Lapis was the only character for whom I knew exactly what I wanted her Room scene to look like from the start, and the rest of the Room crystallized around that idea.

Lapis' flashback was Farla's idea. My original idea was her scene from _Dissonant Harmony_, and I failed to come up with a good replacement scene even though in retrospect this one seems so obvious.

## Peridot

Peridot was a little difficult, because her character wasn't so much derailed by the ending as it was obliterated. She contributes nothing to the plot of the final arc and is completely absent for most of it. She is a nonentity.

Which is so frustrating, because she is _so_ incredibly relevant to the question of if Homeworld deserves to be redeemed. She was a Kindergarten technician, which we know from the off-colors meant she was shattering everyone who didn't make the cut, quite possibly personally. How did she feel about that? Why did she believe the propaganda? What does she think now that she's defected? We never directly address how she feels about shattering and Kindergartens even though that was her entire life before this.

And how messed up is it that she's doing all that while being a disabled gem herself? She knows _exactly_ how close to the cut she is. She would be shattering gems just barely worse than her. But she had been saved, and they weren't. Why? Would she have been shattered in Era 1? Might those gems _not_ be shattered in a hypothetical Era 3, then? _She should have opinions on this._

Fortunately, I had already engaged with some of those questions in _Between Stars_, so it was easy to expand them into a longer sequence here. I worried it would be too much of a rehash, but I think I added enough to make it worthwhile, especially since her scene in _Between Stars_ was so rushed and didn't get much followup.

Originally, I wanted to have an additional thread of scenes involving her relationship with Lapis, and addressing the awkwardness of Steven forcing them to make up in "Barn Mates". Ultimately, Farla and I decided there wasn't enough there and what we had was substantial enough already, so I cut it.

I like the ultimate resolution, even though I came to it as I was writing rather than planning it out from the start. If you look at Peridot's canon behavior, she's not mindlessly loyal or obedient – she tries to sway Yellow Diamond through reasoned argument, because she believes Yellow Diamond is acting in good faith and genuinely misinformed. She disagrees with Lapis about fleeing Earth. She's incredibly vocal and opinionated, it's just not obvious because she's rarely put in a position where she has to act on those opinions. I think this is a good point to make on the theme of gems being their own people and getting to have their own lives.

Her Room sequence was one of the hardest to come up with, even though it had been staring me in the face while writing her healing sequence. What made it click was Farla asking, "Well, why did the writers leave her out?" For exactly the reasons I already outlined, of course – she would necessitate engaging with the Homeworld they had actually shown us throughout the series, and not the toothless fantasy version they tried to press on us in the ending.

I honestly think I'm right on the money with my analysis. The writers couldn't figure out how to redeem the diamonds given their actual crimes, so the only way to create a happy ending was to pretend they didn't happen. Only by replacing the diamonds with different characters who committed completely different but more forgivable crimes could Steven save everyone. Peridot would break that illusion.

It's subtle, but this also adds additional horror to the alternate ending. Even assuming someone did have to stay behind to watch Jasper, it didn't have to be Peridot. Steven's first thought was to keep Peridot from coming to Homeworld, just as he did in his dream.

Her flashback was my idea – actually the first one I wrote, I think! I feel it's really nice to show that after all her doubt about her own worth and loyalty, she's the one who ultimately saved the gems.

Peridot's Encouragements have different messages than Steven's, a detail I enjoyed.

Also, uh, just as sidenote: To everyone who wanted to see a Peridot/Lapis fusion in the finale, Peridot is explicitly a metaphor for asexuality, and the point of her attempt with Garnet was supposed to be respecting that. As an ace myself, it is a little uncomfortable for fandom to so gleefully ignore that. I get that fusions are cool and all, but maybe don't erase the characters' identities in a show about queer issues, please?

## Garnet

Garnet is not dependent.

Ruby and Sapphire's relationship is not unhealthy. When we see them apart, they are dysfunctional, yes, but no more than other gems. They're narrow-minded, penned into very specific specialties that prevent them from handling every situation gracefully, oh, like we're explicitly told and shown multiple times is the problem for all gems and the exact problem fusion is meant to solve. In "That Will Be All", Sapphire literally freezes up when faced with a problem she couldn't foresee on her own, and it is Ruby's support that allows her to think on her feet just as Garnet would. As Garnet, they are one of the most focused and intelligent of the gems, both tactically and emotionally.

How is that a bad thing? No man is an island. Ruby and Sapphire can be individually dysfunctional but function well together by making up for each others' faults. That's not "dependency", that is _a good relationship_. Why does an aromantic need to tell you this, fandom?

So it baffled me when canon decided to reveal that, surprise, they actually are unhealthily codependent and this is clearly a problem we need to address during our whirlwind tour of wrapping up all the characters' arcs in as messy a bow as possible before we move on to the story of how genocidal dictators and the white boy are the real victims.

The events of "The Question" came out of absolutely nowhere. We are really supposed to believe they have never thought about this issue in _five thousand years?_ This issue that was never actually an issue in the four-and-a-half seasons prior to this? We are supposed to believe that an ancient being who has shepherded the entirety of human civilization alongside two human geeks doesn't know what a wedding is and never considered it before this? (Pearl even explicitly says she learned the idea of knighthood from humans, so they absolutely were adopting human customs! If Garnet wanted to be married by now _she would be_.) Just because they act childish does not mean they are literally children. (As in literally, we can see how much dopier the newborn ruby is in "Hit the Diamond" and how Ruby looks like a genius in comparison.) I really and truly believe the writers threw in that plot entirely because fandom whined so much about them being dependent.

The other issue I have with Garnet that kind of got buried under all the relationship stuff is that her relationship is not all that she is. She has the fewest internal issues of the main three, but what issues she does have are not related to her relationship. They come from the fact that she is clearly not prepared to be leader and is cracking under the strain. I remember that back when "Story For Steven" first aired, a lot of people noticed that Garnet was a lot more casual and relaxed in the flashback compared to the serious, stoic face she puts on in the present. None of the gems were equipped to take over from Rose, but Garnet was forced into the role by dint of there being no one better. I really thought the show was going somewhere with this, but after season 3 it seems to just fizzle. Flanderizing her to ignore this in favor of making her all about her relationship is… very awkward in a show about LGBT issues. I don't want to say it feels like fetishizing, but it does kinda feel like fetishizing. Fans liked Ruby and Sapphire arguing and being cute together, so we got more and more of that to the detriment of Garnet herself.

So, as for how this translated into _Flawed Crystals_. My original high-concept outline was for Garnet's healing sequence to have three parts: One for Ruby, one for Sapphire, and one for Garnet herself about the issues of stress and responsibility I just mentioned. But the last element didn't really work. In addition to not having a clear anchor scene, I had already established that Stevonnie decomposes in the mindscape, so it wouldn't make sense for Garnet to actually appear.

Fortunately, I managed to offload the Garnet study into her home chat. I think it works better there anyway, since it's an issue that's harder to definitively solve.

This freed up the healing sequence to be entirely about Ruby and Sapphire and the dependency issue. I believe Farla came up with most of the ideas here, particularly the option to lie to them. (There is actually some unique text if that pushes you over the edge for the bad ending, for you Easter egg hunters out there.)

I enjoyed Sapphire shutting Steven down and kicking him out "for his own good". Shoe's on the other foot now, Steven! It was also fun to write Ruby being petulant and unhelpful. I think it's good to occasionally have the gems be less coherent at expressing their problems – in addition to feeling truer to real mental issues, it forces you to be more patient with them.

Garnet's Room scene took a bit of thinking – I knew Farla especially was annoyed by the wedding, but it's not inherently terrible in the same way the other derailments are, and I didn't want to rag too much on depicting a gay wedding in a kid's show, which I do understand is a big deal. We ended up focusing specifically on the events of "The Question", with Ruby's monologue about her dependency issues. This one probably had the weakest support for the fever dream theory, but I do think that the explanation I gave makes sense. I suspect that the fandom, the writers, or both grew too enamored with Garnet and her relationship, and Flanderized her in an attempt to appeal and to conform her to a standard narrative.

Coming up with Garnet's dialogue in the final battle was therefore a bit tricky, since the wedding isn't a really personal attack in the way the other scenes are. It was Farla who suggested focusing on the I-want-to-be-the-prettiest-princess angle, and that worked out really well. It was definitely something I wanted to address but couldn't fit into the previous scenes, and it made sense for Garnet to bring it up, as she has always seemed to have the most personal hatred for the diamonds.

Her flashback was Farla's idea. Initially I actually thought that Bismuth would be the one to use the bomb, but on reflection it made sense that she'd trust it to Garnet. The scene itself was very seat-of-my-pants, but I really like what I came up with. Garnet's anger towards the diamonds isn't as obvious as Bismuth's, but it's definitely there and I enjoyed giving that reminder.

## Amethyst

I was initially worried I wouldn't be able to come up with anything good for Amethyst, because I felt her character arc was actually adequately resolved long before the ending disaster, at the end of season 3 when she confronts and shows sympathy to Jasper. The only thing I felt I could really mine from the fever dream was the events of "What's Your Problem?", which were less overtly bad than the other character derailments. (Farla does note that Amethyst claiming they're the adults and it's their fault for making Steven deal with their problems was an ominous warning note for _Future_. I assumed that was just Amethyst empathizing with Steven since she personally was in a similar position, but alas…)

But there was one other issue I did feel strongly about and that the fever dream also derailed: Amethyst's body dysphoria.

It fills me with a seething, blinding rage every time I think about how Rose was allowed to use shapeshifting to solve her body problems but Amethyst wasn't. In a dark way it's a pretty perfect analogy for how [privilege allows you to more easily "be yourself"](https://afriendlyirin.tumblr.com/post/614951572357758976/charliebink-what-shape-are-you), but the hideous unfairness of it was never addressed by the show.

So that was the theme I went with. Most of the details were Farla's ideas – I believe the only idea that was entirely my own was the final scene with her learning to shapeshift, and Farla still edited that one heavily. (In the first draft, I accidentally phrased it as if looking in the mirror _gave_ Amethyst dysphoria, which obviously is not how it actually works.)

In the end I really ended up liking this one, especially all of her responses to the bad options. (I'm still tickled by her reacting to Connie in "You're the best!") I think I did a good job of breaking down Steven's normal platitudes and why they don't work for her. Coming up with the resolution was probably the hardest part, because jeez, this is heavy stuff with no clear solution. Farla again came to the rescue there; "You won't know if you don't try" was her idea.

I initially had the idea of a copy of Amethyst whipping herself in the mind sequence, but decided that was too over-the-top and went with self-flagellation instead.

It was interesting to explore the limb enhancers angle. Initially, Amethyst throwing them overboard just seemed like her regular dickishness, but given what we know now, it takes on a darker implication. I recall there was some discourse back in the day about whether Peridot deserved to get her limb enhancers back; the message of the show seems to be that she didn't need them and using them was conforming to Homeworld's evil standards, but I'm not so convinced about that. It's generally not a good message to say people don't really need prosthetics and using them compromises your soul.

Her Room scene was difficult to come up with since, again, I didn't have strong opinions on her role in the canon ending. Farla came up with the idea of using her to get at the issue of Steven fiddling while gems were shattered, which I think worked well. Amethyst is often seen and characterized as very selfish and self-centered, so I liked having her ultimate resolution be a defiance of that, that she is capable of experiencing empathy and caring about people who are hurting the same way she is.

Her flashback was actually my idea! It made really depressing sense that the corruption would hurt her the most, so I wanted to write that. The only tricky part was how to do it without giving away that the diamonds were shattered, but the timeline and descriptions of the flashbacks are vague enough that I think it worked.

I'm glad I got to slip in her referring to Steven as her brother in the final battle. I know gems have different concepts of relationships and family so they wouldn't know to phrase it in those terms, but they're family and that should be acknowledged, dang it. Amethyst has only ever known human culture, so I thought it justifiable. I originally wanted her to say it in her home chat, too, but considered it too awkward given she was talking to Stevonnie and not Steven alone.

## Pearl

Pearl is our favorite. Probably relatedly, she is also the most complicated.

Much like Rose, fandom has always hated Pearl. We attribute this to misogyny and ableism. Pearl displays autistic behavior that often manifests in her doing things that are inconvenient and difficult, which we are less inclined to forgive in women than we are in men. That her actions also inconvenience, hurt, or endanger her child mark her as a failure of a mother (because as we all know that's a binary and it can't ever be that parents are flawed people with their own issues) in a way I again suspect a lot of the people baying for her blood would excuse in a father figure _*cough*Stanley Pines*cough*_.

**FARLA:** _I think a big part of what I loved about Pearl is precisely why she's hated, which is that she's a puzzle of a person. It can take effort to work out why she's behaving a certain way and requires figuring out what the situation looks like from her perspective and what factors she's reacting to that others aren't. Pearl is at times very rational and at other times pulled under by emotion, and it's not always clear when one is masking the other. Pearl's behavior looks very different if you see it as something not entirely under her control - fandom was very upset early on by her letting Steven fall when he tried to chase her, while to me I thought it was evidence of how much she cared that despite how upset and overwhelmed she was, and how much she didn't want to be around him at the time, she still reacted to make sure he'd caught himself and wasn't in danger before retreating again._

_I also really liked the specificity of her love of Earth things. Rose does the general all-loving business, but Pearl picks and chooses, and to me that's the greater compliment even if it's less flattering overall than to be told the gems find everything humans do the superior option._

What I liked about Pearl was what I liked about Rose, and precisely what everyone hated about both of them: That she had strong wants, opinions, and agency. Despite her internalized casteism, she is _constantly_ asserting herself, making her own decisions, and expressing her own desires, even if she doesn't seem consciously aware of it. The things Homeworld asserts about her, and the things she criticizes about herself, are veritably untrue, but the propaganda of the society she was raised in prevents her from seeing that. That sort of half-way state, with her own doubts being the only remaining block to her self-actualization, felt very true to the idea of a person who already went through a rebellion but still has unresolved issues, and an interesting and poignant avenue to explore.

...So of course the canon chose to resolve this by just yelling at her to get fixed, because ordering a slave to not follow orders definitely solves all problems forever. Like with Garnet, I really feel like if that was the solution, she would have encountered it by now.

But oh, no, that wasn't enough for the writers. They had to completely erase her character, too. I guess four and a half seasons of her asserting that she was her own person and how evil it was that Homeworld treated her like property were supposed to teach us that that was wrong and what would really make her happy was being a slave that got to talk back once in a while.

Really – compare her behavior in the Zoo arc to Diamond Days. In the Zoo, we _see_ how viscerally uncomfortable she is with acting in that role and how much she chafes against it. There is none of that when she becomes Steven's pearl. She's so happy to be one of his things, provided she gets to object to being one of his things so Steven can show how woke he is with a meaningless symbolic gesture without actually changing his behavior towards her in any way.

Much like Garnet, she appears to have been Flanderized just down to her relationship (which the movie doubles down on). Her problem, apparently, was never Homeworld's conditioning or her role in their unjust society, nor even self-abnegation; it was just that she was self-abnegating for _Rose_, the spawn of Satan and worst person in the universe. As long as she's enslaving herself to Rose's _reincarnation_, everything's fine.

(Oh, and now also her relationship with Rose actually _is_ problematic and abusive. Master/slave romances are not cute, people. Like with "The Question", the endgame of SU actively invents problems just to insist they're not problems. I can not even.)

Like the rest of the finale, everything about Pearl's resolution feels like the writers giving up on delivering on the nuance they promised. People with autism and internalized self-hatred are really inconvenient and hard to deal with, so… screw it, we'll just wave our hands and declare she's fixed. See, she gets to be a perfectly supportive cheerleader for Steven now, just like everyone else! Isn't that what you wanted?

...So, how do we fix all that?

We knew this was going to be a hard one going in. Pearl is always the most averse to directly confront the source of her problems, and often veers off into unhealthy coping mechanisms and acting like she's solved them instead of slowing down or stopping to a point where intervention would be easy. Compounding that is her internalized casteism that makes it nigh impossible for her to consciously assert her needs or even observe her problems in the first place, so it's going to be really hard for her to bring up the issues on her own. As an added complication, I also wanted this sequence to foreshadow the fever dream and hash out the details of exactly how the events of A Single Pale Rose went down in this AU.

We threw a _lot_ of ideas at the wall before we got something to stick. I knew early on that I wanted the resolution to be Steven acknowledging her as his mom, and that we should probably do something to address the question of if she wants to be free for herself or if she was just following Rose's lead. (...A question exacerbated by canon, where by all appearances she really was just participating in some bizarre roleplay and never actually wanted to be free.) But I didn't have a solid idea of how to get there.

We came up with several ideas that weren't bad, but just didn't fit the thread we ended up with. One interesting idea was for Pearl to have a breakdown over how much worse she's gotten since she lost Rose, and believing that to mean all the good parts of her were because of Rose and on her own she's just terrible. The solution to this would be to tell her that she's just grieving and having trouble processing, and the reason she can't acknowledge that is that that would mean admitting Rose did something wrong – that Rose hurt her without intending to. Another idea was to show the murder attempt from Three Gems as a Baby, possibly getting into guilt about how she resents Steven for not being Rose, but Farla shot that one down pretty early as being a dead end that would just make everyone miserable without accomplishing anything.

I also really wanted one of the bad options to be how Steven "fixes" her in canon, "Don't forget about yourself!" The issue is that that's not actually a bad thing to say in and of itself, and it's only in the context of literally forcing it into her brain that it's awful. The closest I got to it was "Well she shouldn't have given you orders! You need to think for yourself!" in the final section.

This section was also always going to have the added wrinkle that both Pearl and Steven are heavily tied up in Rose, so Steven is going to have strong personal opinions too. Since I am firmly in the camp that Rose did nothing wrong and Steven needs to suck it up and deal, I consistently went with those being very bad options. (Which I think makes logical sense – hating Rose means he hates himself, and that can't be good for anyone's mental health.)

Ultimately, I think Pearl's healing sequence is the weakest. There is just so much to get into with her, and Steven's too close to it to properly address all of it. The sequence ended up focusing a lot on Steven and Rose, which was kind of inevitable but still interacts awkwardly with the theme of her being her own person. It might have been better to swap some of the scenes out with ideas from the draft, but it was hard enough to make the current scenes flow logically. I do like the opening of having to coax her into starting the first memory, and Steven acknowledging that running out on her was his fault.

Her Room sequence was a lot easier. The only tricky part was coming up with a single memory to anchor it on, but Farla came up with the idea of doing a montage instead. I'm glad we didn't need to write a complicated response from her; I think her simple reaction says all that needs to be said on why it is so deeply, deeply screwed up.

Her flashback was Farla's idea, again because the one I originally wrote didn't make emotional sense. I felt it was a bit insubstantial, but Farla felt it had good dramatic irony with the knowledge that Homeworld ended up ruined.

The scene where Steven calls her his mom made me tear up and I'm really glad I got to do it, even if it was a bit hard to make it follow from the other scenes. Because she _is_ his mom, dang it, even moreso than the other gems. This had already been percolating in my mind, but specifically, I think it was Ember Keelty referring to Pearl as such in her review of _Between Stars_ that made me determined to say it explicitly. I think this reframing is good for Pearl, because while a mother is still supposed to help and support a child, it's not a subservient role. She can have self-respect and self-worth without feeling like that's selfish or a betrayal of the people she cares about.

## Bismuth

Ah, the Biscourse.

When "Bismuth" first aired, I sided with Steven. Shattering the diamonds might not have been wrong, but those quartz-sized dummies are proof enough that she wasn't going to stop at them. Killing conscripts is bad, and hypocritical when you're on a team of former conscripts who only joined your side because you gave them a chance. (I thought this was pretty clear, but fandom only seemed to be screaming about whether or not it was right for her to shatter the diamonds. Perhaps this is why the writers stripped all nuance from the show, they figured that if people weren't noticing it they might as well not bother.)

But of course, that's a really thorny issue that would be really hard to forgive and resolve! So like with the diamonds, the writers just retconned the problems out of existence. Suddenly Bismuth _was_ only going to shatter diamonds! Suddenly she is somehow okay with her commanding officer imprisoning her purely out of self-interest, because that's somehow better than doing it out of moral principles! Suddenly the Black-coded bottom-class worker thinks the architect of her rebellion being of the oppressor class makes total sense!

So I think we can all agree that something ate Bismuth and is now wearing her skin as a suit.

The whole scene in "Made of Honor" was honestly just so baffling that Farla decided abject confusion was the only sensible response for Bismuth to have in the Room.

I knew that since Bismuth was complicated, I wanted her healing sequence to be complicated too. I identified her issues as coming from three distinct parts: her anger, her grief, and the morality of her hard choices.

Anger, the red shard, was actually the easiest. A lot of its themes were very similar to the scene I wrote in chapter 11 of _Between Stars_, but I got to get deeper into them and have her push much harder. Ember Keelty (who was a beta tester for this game) said she felt that Bismuth's behavior in that scene was inconsistent and confusing, like she kept toeing the line but stepping back from actually saying she wanted to be violent. I ultimately agreed with this – I felt that I had to hold Bismuth back in that scene, both to keep her sympathetic and because she's trying to convince Steven of something and knows she has to be diplomatic. But here, the gloves are off. I can have her be as truly angry as she wants.

The key thing I made sure to include, and the major divergence from _Between Stars_, is that she _does_ say she actively wants the diamonds to die. I was worried this might be going too far for Steven to accept, but I liked the way it turned out. Forcing Steven to accept and legitimize Bismuth's anger was a really good resolution, I think, and one we don't see often enough in media. Writing her bad option responses was cathartic, and I think I made a lot of good points about the ways we normally treat this, especially in regards to who we really value when we do so. Yes, why is it always the angry oppressed who have to calm down? Whose feelings are we really trying to spare, here?

The blue shard was the opposite, getting into the morality of if what she's done is right. This was harder to write, mainly because I had to come up with my own memory scenes instead of working off canon, but I ultimately liked the progression we came up with and the justification for why she started thinking she had to shatter gems at all – which was always an awkward question when bubbling exists.

I like the resolution for the blue shard. Something I found very interesting with Bismuth is her duality – she is extremely aggressive and boisterous towards her enemies, but she is capable of turning gentle on a dime. I'm struck by how kind and patient she is with Steven in the opening of "Bismuth", even though she must be so freaked out. She sees a small, fragile human, and her first instinct is to calm herself, talk to him softly, and ask if he's okay. She's not just a loose cannon – her compassion burns just as brightly as her indignation. [Love and anger can coexist.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16029737/chapters/48818000)

(I particularly like that, after Amethyst sneers that none of the others will apologize to Steven, Bismuth is the only other gem to apologize of her own volition. She holds herself to just as high a standard as she holds everyone else, and she is capable of recognizing when she's made a mistake.)

The pink shard was probably the hardest, not for the scenes themselves but for the resolutions. Because, jeez, what _is_ the solution here? I initially expedited the first scene by having the solution just be "But you can make new friends," but commenters responded to say they found that too callous and dismissive of her trauma. I successfully rewrote it to their satisfaction and uploaded a new version within a day. Take note, authors.

The concept of feeling someone be shattered while fused and how traumatic that would be was an idea Farla came up with for _Between Stars_. It's only mentioned briefly there, but I knew I wanted to get into it here. While the blue shard justifies Bismuth's actions logically, I would hope this provides good justification for her actions emotionally (an entanglement that was always interesting to me, which is why I bring it up at the end). It's really ignorant of Steven to dismiss her anger when she has suffered so much worse than he could ever even imagine, and so he needs to experience what she felt in order to really understand her.

The idea of making the final scene of each shard be the same memory from different perspectives was an unplanned one, but I really like how it turned out. Bismuth did this awful thing for so many reasons, and you have to understand all of them before you can judge her for it. I didn't want to come down too definitively on either one of them being completely right or wrong, and Bismuth's imperfect recollection of the scene works well for preserving that ambiguity.

I wrote the shards in the order blue, red, pink. (You may note they also correspond to the minibosses Justice, Judgment, and Vengeance, respectively – those are intentional parallels.) I think I wrote a few of the opening scenes before I was finished with the previous one, but otherwise I focused on one at a time.

Bismuth ripping her arms off to make the minibosses was inspired by the JENOVA bosses in _Final Fantasy VII_. I thought it nicely visceral.

In my very first outline, I went a lot harder on the violence debate, and even went so far as to float the idea that Bismuth would attack you after being healed if you tried to shut her down. This was in the original plot draft where Steven accompanies them on the mission and the diamonds were captured instead of shattered, so she would be accusing you of being the reason everyone got corrupted and arguing they should be shattered now. I had a vague idea that you would have to turn a diamond over to her to show your trust, and that if you had made valid arguments she'd agree to keep the diamond alive and otherwise she'd shatter her then and there. Obviously, this was way too convoluted (and interacted awkwardly with Jasper as well), so I'm glad we removed that quandary by taking the deaths of the diamonds entirely out of your hands.

I personally think that Bismuth's kill scene is the saddest. It purposefully mirrors her own "death" scene in "Bismuth".

## Connie

Connie is great and it's a crime how much canon sidelined her. Though she's never the direct focus like the gems are, I wanted to give her an important role.

One of the things that most frustrated me about the canon ending is how Connie becomes flattened to just being Steven's cheerleader and supporter, after she had spent so long being the outside perspective, criticizing and questioning things and coming up with her own solutions. To me, her post-Wanted behavior is the crux of who she is and the role she should serve, not a… flaw or an odd blip or however we were supposed to take that?

So that is what I emphasized here. In the healing sequences, she lacks the emotional intelligence and connection to lead the talks herself, but she's smart enough to call you out when you make the wrong choice and hint at the correct solution. This was somewhat inspired by the behavior of Rin in _Fate/Stay Night_, where if you made a decision that would otherwise lead to a bad ending when she was around, she'd call you an idiot and get you back on track.

One of the other angles I wanted to explore with her was her relationship to the other gems. This is something that canon never really gets into, even as she spends more and more time with them and explicitly learns fighting from Pearl and Garnet. I wanted to show that she cares about them too, and that even as a complete outsider she is knowledgeable and passionate about their fight against oppression. Unfortunately I didn't get to emphasize this _too_ much, because the focus of the piece is still solidly on Steven and the Crystal Gems. But I'm proud of the details I did manage to include, like her techniques all being learned from the Crystal Gems, and the chat scene with Amethyst, the gem that I think she'd have the most in common with.

I liked writing her interactions with her mom, another thing we don't get a lot of in canon. We start off with her having a fraught relationship with her mom, and at the end we say she's resolved that, but it all happens offscreen. I enjoyed the opportunity to focus in on that in the ending, and to explore how Priyanka herself feels about sending her daughter into danger – another thing that we probably should have gotten more of in canon.

As a sidenote, one thing I hinted at was that the reason Steven wasn't able to heal corrupted gems on his own was that Connie contributed something unique to the process. One of the things Farla and I noticed about Steven is that despite literally having empathy powers, he is pretty crap at actual empathy; we think this is an extension of the fact that gems as a whole seem to be pretty bad at empathy, even Rose. Connie, as a full human, might therefore have better empathy than Steven; that, combined with Steven's magical empathy, is what allows them to connect with the gems' minds.

However! Connie was already the hero who single-handedly saved the day in _Between Stars_, so I didn't want her to hog the spotlight too much this time. This is why she's unceremoniously benched for the final fight, to make room for…

## Jasper

Jasper was always intended to be the star of the piece, as I hope I conveyed by giving her second billing. She was the character I couldn't work into _Between Stars_ at all and the character who was most screwed over by canon, so I knew I wanted to focus on her for this. This is why she is your first and constant companion. I tried to remind you of her existence as much as possible in every area – this was convenient, since I had no guarantee any of the other gems would be present and I did not want to write six different variations for every scene anyway, so she pulls the heavy lifting on all character interactions.

Originally, I actually did not have the idea of the half-healing and amnesia. In my initial draft of the plot, Steven did fully heal her at the start, but that made me scramble to come up with reasons why she would stick around. My best idea was that Stevonnie would hold one of the diamonds hostage (either for real or as a bluff), but that was such a dick move and still didn't justify why she wouldn't just do a suicide attack anyway, plus that's so heavy and such a central conflict that it was narratively incoherent to resolve it before everything else... Farla came up with the idea for the amnesia, which I am very grateful for. That made it work out perfectly: inverting the existing relationship dynamic, adding a sense of background dread to the whole plot, and making it build to an appropriate climax by having Jasper be the final healed gem.

It was Farla who pushed the idea of characterizing Jasper as actually kind and protective.

**FARLA:** _Putting aside the lens of Steven's (very justified) fear, what do we know about Jasper? She sees no issue with fusing with apparent noncombatant Lapis who she's shoving around - she knows fusing with weaker gems still gives a big power boost and it's her immediate reaction to a tough enemy, she's done this a lot. Her first day alive involved a pitched battle, probably on the kindergarten grounds themselves. The human zoo is almost entirely populated by regulation amethysts with just two defective ones from the Beta kindergarten, suggesting Jasper's compatriots were mostly wiped out. And her anger at Rose Quartz is extremely personal._

_Jasper is terrifying when she's your opponent, but we see no sign she's a bad person to have on your side. (It's easy to assume she's simply sadistic because we're introduced to her being cruel to Lapis, but Lapis' loyalty was, well, nonexistent and she didn't do much to hide that.) So my guess was that Jasper was someone with strong personal ties who was terrible at seeing any bigger picture - she also doesn't seem to even understand what the war was about, despite how much it looms over her, she just knows the Crystal Gems were her opponents._

_And a recurring theme of Steven Universe is the difficulty of understanding others, so having the most clearly enemy character be one with a particularly big gulf in how she presents herself makes more sense than her just being more evil than others._

_Also, as someone who does not tend toward high in-group/out-group division, I find that fascinating in a character!_

The idea of giving you options to bully Jasper was an early one, but the specific scenes and format were spur-of-the-moment. I wrote the Barn first, and there it was very easy to come up with the sequence of "Ronaldo sticks his nose where it doesn't belong, Jasper gets weird around him, you can interpret that as aggressive." After that, I stuck to the formula of coming up with one "Jasper choice" for each area. (With the exception of the Forge; I couldn't think of anything there that wouldn't be forced.)

I knew I wanted Jasper's healing to be a high-risk situation. If you make even a single wrong choice in the whole thing, you miss out on the chance to make friends with her. The more bad things you've done to her, the more choices you'll have to make, increasing the chance you'll mess up. Jasper's friendship is an ideal "best ending" scenario you should only get if you've been a genuinely good person.

Initially, I intended for the first part of the healing sequence to be more involved and require you to actually solve Ocean Jasper's issues – I even tried to do that in her prologue healing scene, before Farla shot it down as unnecessarily complicated. However, that of course led to the problem that we don't know what Ocean Jasper's issues are. I thought of arguing that the memories that stuck to Jasper are the ones that resonated with her, so we could use Ocean Jasper as a foil to get at Jasper's own issues, but ultimately that still proved too complex. Farla suggested the idea of the "What side was I on?" confusion being the sticking point, so that's what we went with.

It was Farla who suggested the Press X To Die option in the first segment of her sequence. That's really the moment of truth: Do you care about Jasper as a person, or are you just trying to keep her your friend? Connie's final response to Steven quotes his response to Bismuth over the Breaking Point, for irony.

Farla also came up with the idea of the "choose between Pink Diamond and your friends" ultimatum leading to an even worse ending. I came up with that option while spitballing possible responses for that section, and Farla decided that it was too cruel of a thing to say for it to work as a solution.

Jasper always confronts you about waiting to heal her, no matter what. From a gameplay perspective, this was so that there would always be some content there, and some chance for you to piss her off.

The exact branches and responses happened somewhat spur-of-the-moment as I was writing the scene. I think they worked out well; essentially, she only accepts your excuses if they're true. Saying "It was an accident" only works if you told her she was corrupted previously; saying "I was scared" only works if you told her the truth about her memories; saying "I always wanted to heal you" only works if it's true; saying "I needed you" only works if you've done nothing bad to her at all; and saying "I'm sorry" always works. When she confronts you on your other choices, you always have three options: An invalid excuse, a valid excuse, and an unconditional apology. She accepts only two valid excuses; any more, and she will insist you aren't really sorry and you'll fail the friendship test. I worried this structure may have been too repetitive, but it seems to have worked.

I think this produced a nice nuance to the scene. I didn't want to just totally bash the player and punish them for doing anything but groveling at Jasper's feet; there are valid reasons why you may have made the bad choices you did, and I wanted to give the player a chance to justify themselves. The more goodwill you've bought, the more leeway Jasper gives you to stand your ground.

Farla did suggest providing no solution if you had been maximally bad to her, but I felt that ran counter to the themes of redemption, change, and forgiveness I had going here. I also wanted to allow for the possibility that the player genuinely changed their mind; a lot of games never account for that possibility or give you the chance to turn things around, and I think that strips the narrative of a lot of depth. Being maximally bad to her _does_, however, leave you with no choice but groveling at her feet, which I think is appropriate. If you're sorry at that point, you have to show it through real humility.

If you've done absolutely nothing bad to her, it is impossible to fail (outside of the two bad ending choices) – this wasn't exactly intended, but I kept it anyway. It still doesn't totally lock you out of the non-friends outcome, because you can still bully her in the scene leading up to the healing.

Of course, I have no idea how well this all actually came across, because despite constantly begging for it I got **ZERO** comments on the story outside of my existing in-group, because comment culture is dead. Seriously, people, why? Why you do this? Please give me human words, I am sad and lonely.

I originally planned to not force you into the Room immediately after healing Jasper; this would allow for you to have an additional chat with her real self. I actually got as far as writing most of this out, with branches depending on if she liked you or not, but Farla nixed it on the grounds it just didn't make sense for Stevonnie to be able to stick around indefinitely after how badly corrupted they were. There would have also been the issue of going into the Room willingly being a really dumb idea, so how to justify that… This works much better, even if we had to give up some Jasper. I think her dialogue in the final scene still covers it well enough. I had also planned for this to involve a conversation with Amethyst about her murder attempt, but I managed to work in her justification for that into her healing sequence anyway.

## Steven

I'm gonna double down on this: Rose's and Jasper's assessment of Steven in the Room is completely accurate to his canon counterpart. Canon!Steven is a terrifying, awful person and no one but the diamonds deserve to suffer his twisted, possessive, controlling idea of "love".

Which is a shame, because I liked Steven right up until The Twist. This is probably because I, quite reasonably I think, saw his immature and myopic behavior as flaws he was supposed to grow out of, and not reasons to root for him. In _The Darkness Between Stars_, I dealt with this disconnect by just completely ignoring his canon characterization and basically declaring him to be a different person more in line with his early behavior and the trajectory I thought his character was heading. But _Flawed Crystals_ was always going to be about more directly facing the specific character issues in canon, and so I knew I had to address this to be completely satisfied. Steven must answer for his crimes.

This actually turned out to be a really good idea, given the dialogue puzzles and corruption theme. It worked really well to give the "bad" dialogue options more of a punch by making them what Steven says or would say in canon. "Just get over it," "Do it for me," "You are terrible but I forgive you." I intended for this to be foreshadowing of the fever dream theory, but perhaps that was too out there for readers to catch onto.

The idea of the canonical ending being a fever dream of Steven's was something Farla came up with around the time "Heart of the Crystal Gems" aired. Diamond Days only made it sound more plausible. Seriously, it reads like a completely different story. After four and a half seasons about how trauma is hard and messy and there are no quick, easy solutions, everything's getting neatly resolved in 10 minutes with a hug and a pep talk? That's not what would actually happen... but it's definitely what Steven would _want_ to happen. Then we get an ending about how, despite being the least affected by the diamonds personally, it's _his_ wants and traumas (which came out of absolutely nowhere and were invented wholly for that arc) that get all the focus and everyone else has to step back and be supportive because the straight cis white prince boy has it so much worse, you guys. Steven is made the center of the universe, is given everything he wants [no matter how absurd or impossible it is](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0889.html), and everyone else is reduced to a prop in his narrative – with Rose in particular, the one person he has personal stake in, being the one person he can't forgive and who he uses as a scapegoat for everything. (With that in mind, even Rose's sword being shattered seems like something he would want.)

Pray tell, how are we supposed to interpret that as _anything_ but, ah, _someone_ having a psychotic break and completely rewriting a narrative they no longer like to serve their own wish fulfillment? It just makes more sense. It is, in fact, the _only_ thing that makes Watsonian sense, because [as I have discussed previously](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16029737), the canon is utterly incoherent and full of plot holes you can drive a train through.

Farla initially discouraged using this theory.

**FARLA:** _Right so my issue was just that it was pretty complex and also I hate everything about that chunk of canon and would rather ignore it fully. It wasn't a theory I was bandying about to fix canon, it was an expression of how much I hated it and how I felt it betrayed the idea of every other character mattering. My love of Steven Universe came down to trying to work out everyone's personality and goals and secret backstories, so having that all flatten down to focus in on Steven was incredibly frustrating._

Farla suggested replacing it with a more general fantasy about making friends with the diamonds. But at this point, especially after watching the movie which also made me physically ill as Steven just kept digging every time I thought he had hit the rock bottom of my expectations, I just said, screw it, this is already a soapbox, why not go all out?

I hope this twist didn't come too out of left field. I did my best to foreshadow it by drawing attention to Steven entering the Room in Pearl's scenes, and there are several other details too, such as Steven getting weird when Bismuth asks him if he can rewrite peoples' personalities. But I can't tell how well it landed, because the _two entire people_ who commented on it were both part of my in-group who already knew about the theory and agreed with me.

In a way, I'd say my version _does_ actually fix canon, a little bit. The issue with the fever dream theory was that, even if we can use it to spare the other characters their derailment, Steven would have to be such an awful person for this to be what he really wanted. By declaring that to be a reflection of madness and his worst self, there is still a path to redemption for him too.

Originally, my idea for the Room phantom was for it to be Greg, as a representation of the purest and most incorruptible thing Steven believes in. But while Farla and I were discussing meta, we felt that there were a lot of unresolved questions about Rose herself. I decided it made sense to posit that, since she _isn't_ definitely dead in this AU, her personality could be drawn out by the corruption screwing with Steven's mind. Unfortunately, we still didn't have a lot of opportunity to get into this – I originally planned for Bismuth to confront her about bubbling her, but Farla nixed it on the grounds that the Room sequence was complex enough already, and I had left it too vague if this was really Rose or just what Steven wants the gems to see.

When Room-Rose uses Stevenified personal pronouns, that's both her and Steven blending together. When she doesn't, that's one of them in particular speaking.

At one point I had the idea to make the Room-Rose a fakeout final boss you fought before Steven – this would have been like Porky in _Mother 3_, a "proper" final boss fight before the weird set piece one. I quickly decided this was unnecessary and made little sense – it's the imaginary phantom who shouldn't be beatable through normal means.

Speaking of _Mother 3_, I originally planned to do a similar thing to its final battle with Dying of the Light, where if you tried to revive characters Steven would just poof them again with his AoE nuke. However, revived characters getting to act immediately threw a wrench into this. I suppose I could have done a special check to have Steven attack instantly, but it didn't seem worth the effort – plus I'd probably have to let the player heal Jasper somehow if they wasted too much time on trying to revive people. Not worth it; I instead opted to dodge the problem entirely by disabling items.

The true final battle was, obviously, heavily inspired by _UnderTale_, and even more directly by an _UnderTale_ homage in _Awful Hospital_, a webcomic I stopped reading ironically because its creator turned against _Steven Universe_. I always knew that I wanted Jasper to be the key to success, since as I said I wanted her to be the heart of this piece, and that came together well on both a story and gameplay level. The Crystal Gems can't snap Steven out of the corruption because they'll only try to forgive and validate him, which plays into his corruption being self-aggrandizement. But Jasper doesn't care what he thinks. She can be as blunt and honest as she needs to be, and Steven will believe her.

But I do also leave the option to attack Steven at any point during the ending, just in case you want to be awful. Steven is set to 1 HP just before, so it will always kill him.

Jasper takes one-fifth her max health from each hit of Dying of the Light in the final sequence. This will leave her with exactly one hit's worth of health remaining by the end if she starts at max health. However, I quietly flag her as immortal for the sequence, so she'll still survive even if she starts at low health.

Originally, I planned for it to be possible to reach the point of Dying of the Light in the talk sequence in any of the bad ending battles with Steven, and it's only when Jasper is fully healed that she's able to block it and start the final sequence. Unfortunately, when I actually started writing it out, I couldn't think of anything that would work outside of the context of the Room. So I collapsed that down to only giving the gems one (bad) talk option in the other fights. (It was Farla's idea to make the talks debuff the gems, in a reversal of how talking normally works in boss fights.)

The description of Steven's corpse in the bad ending is based on speculation that his organic body isn't completely whole and needs the gem to fill in the gaps. We think this is reasonable given he can, y'know, shapeshift. ("Change Your Mind" appears to canonize this at least a little bit, since he looks really messed up without his gem, though I'd go farther and say it's more likely he'd just instantly die without it.)

During his transformation sequence, when Steven thinks everything about his transformation is totally fine and how things are supposed to be, that's intended as a jab against the vast swaths of fandom who insist the canon ending is totally good and fine and makes total sense. The horrified dissonance I hope I made you feel between the reality of what's happening to Steven and his own description of it are exactly what I feel every time I see people gushing about the show now.

The final scene with Jasper was originally going to quote the ending of _Last Scenario_ (which is a great game you should all play): _"Help me." / "I'll save you, I promise. I won't abandon someone who asked for my help."_ Farla made me cut it on the grounds it was too eloquent for Jasper. Farla makes me cut all my self-indulgent scenes. ;_;

## Miscellaneous

Writing in second-person was a fun experience. [It's not the first time I've used it](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8168827), but I played with it a lot more here. One thing I enjoyed was shifting around the point-of-view character and the identity of Steven vs. Connie vs. Stevonnie. The Connie vs. Steven internal chatter wasn't totally planned, but once I started I liked it a lot and tried to work it in as much as possible.

I thought it clever to remain in Steven's POV during the final battle, but in particular, I'm most proud of the switch to Connie's POV in the endings. I purposefully keep the details vague enough that you can't tell it's not Steven for the first few paragraphs, including referring to Priyanka as "Mom". It's intended to give you a flutter of confusion – Did he survive? Is he poofed and seeing Rose inside his gem? Is this all a dying hallucination? – followed by horrified realization.

The Game Over screen was originally going to be from Ruby and Sapphire's perspective with a message implying it was just a vision they saw with their foresight. (This is why there are styles for Ruby and Sapphire text in the stylesheet.) Farla nixed it on the grounds that Garnet would act differently if she knew, and it was just generally too complicated to explain. Fortunately, canon establishes that Garnet has trouble predicting Steven, so it is reasonable that she wouldn't foresee the corruption at all.

The gems' basic attacks (and some others) have different descriptive text during the battle with Steven, noting that they draw blood or leave marks. I didn't have this planned from the beginning; I added them around when I released Garnet, I think. I really liked writing these, and I hope it adds to the tension and atmosphere of the battle while also hinting that attacking will kill him.

The Room boss rematches all have their descriptions changed to one-word deprecations. The main three use the flaws White Diamond calls them by in "Change Your Mind", but I had to make up my own for the others. Finding the right word choice was tricky, but I think I'm happy with what I settled on.

Ronaldo being present for battles in the Barn was entirely Farla's idea; originally, I had him leave after the opening scene. It took some finagling to make it work, but I'm glad I did, because it's hilarious.

Rose's jab about solving your problems by beating them up after defeating the Perfect Crystal is a lampshade of that trope and the awkwardness of forced battles in a game supposedly about healing and reconciliation. It's also a hint that fighting Steven is not what you're supposed to do.

I normally have trouble coming up with titles, but this one was so obvious I was honestly shocked [no one had beaten me to it](https://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bquery%5D=flawed+crystals).

## Fic Journal of the Plague Year

The coronavirus stay-home order was only issued towards the end of this project; I was working on Jasper's healing sequence at the time, I believe. I had already been working at a feverish pace to get the game finished before the end of _Steven Universe Future_ rang the death knell for the fandom, but the extra time at home was probably what allowed me to actually accomplish that. I did this despite getting no personal reward out of it – take note, economists.

**FARLA:** _On my end it also helped enormously with coordination. My time investment in this was nowhere near as high ("I think Ronaldo should be on the battle grid because that's funny!" vs actually coding a NPC and plunking them in there), but we're on very different sleep schedules because one of us is a normal person who goes to bed at 2am and the other one gets up at the crack of dawn and then goes to bed when it's dark out, for some reason. That works okay when it's big sections getting written at once and then me poking a couple bits of it, or suggesting some extra bit of fluff, but by the end of it there was a lot of back-and-forth trying to get the dialogue sequences to make sense as a conversation, and hit the issues we wanted to hit, and also work on the gameplay level._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, guys, please comment on the story. Every time someone leaves a bug report and then never speaks to me again I die a little inside.
> 
> _Your tangential thoughts or outright negativity are embraced here!_
> 
> EDIT 14 APR 2020: Okay, this is starting to get concerning. Are you guys _okay?_ Are you afraid someone's going to eat you if you express an opinion? If you're not willing to comment on the game, can you at least say why on [this meta post about comment drought?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23653036)

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [Long Live Feedback Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. I invite and appreciate feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Constructive criticism
>   * Reader-reader interaction
>   * Tangential thoughts and outright negativity
>   * Literally anything you have to say
> 
> Please tell me about any bugs you encounter, cool stuff you found, balance concerns, questions about the story, or really anything at all! This is the first time I've done anything like this, so I need all the feedback I can get.
> 
> Please also tell me where you found the game! This is helpful for me to know where to advertise.
> 
> I see and appreciate all comments, but may not reply if I'm busy or can't think of anything to say. Please don't feel bad if you don't get a response!
> 
> If you don’t want a reply, for any reason, feel free to say so and I will appreciate it but leave you in peace!


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